Sackville Street

“ The public buildings, however, are especially numerous and handsome. The main thoroughfare, east to west, is by the magnificent quays along the Liffey. The principal street at right angles to the river is Sackville Street, a splendid street 650 yards long and 40 yards wide, forming a thoroughfare which is continued across the river by O'Connell Bridge, a magnificent structure the same width as Sackville Street. The principal public secular buildings are the castle, the official residence of the viceroy; the Bank of Ireland, formerly the Irish Parliament House; Trinity College ”

“ Mountjoy Square enjoys a most extensive prospect, and is elegantly laid out. St. Stephen's Green is the largest square in Europe. Sackville Street is also the widest street, having been originally a Mall, with houses built on each side. Great, however, as these are, Sir R. C. Hoare passes on them some severe criticisms, by no means unfounded.
In the Environs, see the Royal Canal and City Basin; ride round the circular road for good views of the city; visit the light-house at the extremity of a pier upwards of 3 m. in length; and ride over the Phœnix Park, 7 m. in circumference. ”

“ At an early hour the bells began their merry peals, and the people were soon seen in groups in the streets and public squares. The hour of ten was fixed for the procession to leave Kingstown, and it was expected to enter the city at eleven. The windows of the houses in the streets through which the royal train was to pass were at a premium, and seemed to find ready occupants.
Being invited the day previous to occupy part of a window in Sackville-street, I was stationed at my allotted place at an early hour, with an outstretched neck and open eyes. ”

“ A wall enclosed house and gardens from the existing line of Salisbury Court south to the river, and shops and tenements in and near Fleet Street from St. Bride’s to Water Lane (Whitefriars Street) . These were not the only London possessions of the Sackvilles. Later on they overflowed into the Strand, and another Dorset House sprang up, on the site of the present Treasury in Whitehall, to take the place of the older house in Salisbury Court, which had been destroyed in the Great Fire. It is idle and exasperating to speculate on the modern value of these City estates. ”

“ Sackville, who was then Lord Buckhurst, with Sir Charles Sedley and Sir Thomas Ogle, got drunk at the Cock in Bow-street by Covent-garden, and, going into the balcony, exposed themselves to the populace in very indecent postures. At last, as they grew warmer, Sedley stood forth naked, and harangued the populace in such profane language, that the publick indignation was awakened; the crowd attempted to force the door, and, being repulsed, drove in the performers with stones, and broke the windows of the house. ”

“ Arrived at King’s Avon she would quicken her steps and pass rapidly down the village street, glancing about her only sufficiently to acknowledge the greetings of her humble acquaintances, and only when safe within the Manor House gates would she relax a little, and show herself gentle and affectionate towards her father, who, absent as ever, would presently forget that she was married and would invite Calladine to remain to dinner, “Clare and I, my dear friend, may so rarely welcome a visitor.” Through her laughter she looked at him wistfully ”

“ Probably they were even now sitting expectant, waiting to hear her key in the door, waiting to rush out and overwhelm her in the passage, and to pull her in with cries of “Alice, dear, we didn’t mean it!” Let them wait! She started down the wet street, where the gas-lamps shone reflected in the roadway, and as she went she turned up the collar of the overcoat she had snatched off the row of hooks in the passage, for the rain was dripping into her neck. It then occurred to her that the overcoat was not her own. ”

“ So the house must have drowsed, evening after evening, before Chase ever came near it, with the only difference that from one of those doors had emerged an old lady dressed in black silk, leaning on a stick, an arbitrary old lady, who had slowly descended the polished stairs, carefully placing the rubber ferule of her stick from step to step, and helping herself on the banisters with the other hand, instead of the alien clerk from Wolverhampton, who hesitated to go downstairs to dinner because he feared there would be a servant in the room to wait upon him. ”

“ The abbey on the farther side lay heaped in a mass as dark as the mass of the factory. Nan would shift to the other hand the basket she was carrying home from the market-town of Spalding; walking along the elevation of the dyke, she made a tiny, upright figure in the great circle of the flat country, for here the disc of the horizon was as apparent as it is at sea. The group of village, factory, and church, emerged like an island loaded with strange and sombre piles of architecture, adrift from all other encampments of men. ”

“ A great uproar arose in the field below; the crowd scattered, and down the pathway thus cleft they saw, by the light of the flames, a small black shape bundling helter-skelter along, till a ring of shouting men closed round it and hid it from view.
“Rounding up the wild beasts,” said Lovel, amused. “They won’t sacrifice them on the stones,—not they. They’ll all be chivvied back into their cages after a few louts have got a nip on the ankle. I wonder how many will remain at large? All the old women of the village will be going about to-morrow with umbrellas and pokers. ”

“ Fortune is the butler, isn’t he? Well, the butler told me all the servants were very busy.”
“Then it might be as well not to disturb them? At any rate, the old lady won’t run away,” said Mr. Nutley jocosely.
8“No, perhaps we needn’t disturb them.” Chase was relieved to escape the necessity of giving an order to a servant.
They went downstairs together.
“Hold on to the banisters, Mr. Chase; these polished stairs are very tricky. Fine old oak; solid steps too; but I prefer a drugget myself. Good gracious, how that peacock startled me! Look at it, sitting on the ledge outside the window. ”

“ But he was alone; even the curtains behind the windows were drawn. He felt a desire to explore the garden, but hesitated, timorous and apologetic. Hitherto in his life he had explored only other people’s gardens on the rare days when they were opened to the public; he remembered with what pained incredulity he had watched the public helping itself to the flowers out of the borders, for he could not help being a great respecter of property. He prided himself, of course, on being a Socialist; that was the fashion amongst the young men he occasionally frequented in Wolverhampton ”

“ There is, of course, another side to the picture—the sullen disapproval of the serious-minded, the squalor of a London shortly to be rotted by plague and terribly purified by fire—but with this side we have in the present connection no concern. We are in the gay upper stratum of prosperity and fashion, fortunate in the extraordinary vividness of our visualisation ”

“ By walking a little way in the opposite direction, and turning her back upon the village, she would dismiss the factory and look across the liberated country, as it was impossible to do in these days when the floods accompanied the factory for miles around as a reflection of its spirit. She told herself that she wanted nothing more. She knew that she could be happy,—perhaps not indefinitely, but she did not look far ahead, the present was too buoyant and suspended,—happy for the moment if Silas would but leave her alone. ”

“ There were not many girls in the party; she knew why, and a sense of triumph came over her; they might affect to despise Lovel, but for all that they did not care to see him married to one of their own number,—ah, how clever she had been!—not many girls; two men, doddering on their sticks; and a group of young men, the lounging, insolent handsome young men, with their hands stuck into the belts of their smocks, chewing straws for all the world as though they had been in the Waggon of Hay and not on the threshold of a church. ”

“ The sale was announced to begin at midday, because the London train arrived shortly after eleven, but before then the local attendance poured in, and many people drove up who had not previously been seen at the house, their business being with the lands or the farms: farmers in their gigs, tip-toeing awkwardly and apologetically on the polished boards of the hall while their horses were led away into the stable-yard, and there were many of the gentry too, who came in waggonettes or pony-traps. Nutley, watching and prying everywhere, observed the arrival of the latter with mixed feelings. ”

“ Up the centre walk of the garden, and back by the herbaceous borders along the walls: lilac, wistaria, patches of tulips, colonies of iris. All the while Chase never deviated from the topic of selling. He pointed out the house, folded in the hollow down the gentle slope of the garden. “Not bad, for those who like it. Thirty thousand for the house, I think you said?” “Then why the devil,” Nutley wanted to say, but refrained from saying, “do you turn away people who come in a big car?” They strolled down the slope, Chase breaking from the lilac bushes an armful 55of the heavy plumes. ”

“ He had the acquisitiveness of a magpie, for scraps of sale-room gossip. Dealers ticking off items in their catalogues, men in green baize aprons shifting furniture, the front door standing permanently open to all comers, were all a source of real gratification to him; while in the number of motors that waited under the shade of the trees he took a personal pride. He rubbed his hands with pleasure over the coming and going, and at the crunch of fresh wheels on the gravel. Chase’s ridiculous little padlock on the wooden gate—there wasn’t much trace of that now! ”

“ Mr. Sackville purchased a fine estate in the town of ——, in the state of ——. We have left these blanks, which we are well aware are very provoking to all, and especially to young readers, in order to allow them to locate the amiable Sackvilles (the name we confess to be fictitious) wherever they choose, north or south of the Potomac, east or west of the Alleghanies; for we sincerely believe that such pattern families are to be found in every section of our favored country.
Edward was ten, Julia eight years old, when they removed from town. ”

“ But more especially do I feel this concerning Kent and Sussex, and concerning the roads over which the Sackvilles travelled so constantly between estate and estate. The place-names in their letters recur through the centuries; the paper is a little yellower as the age increases, the ink a little more faded, the handwriting a little less easily decipherable, but still the gist is always the same: “I go to-morrow into Kent,” “I quit Buckhurst for Knole,” “my Lord rode to Lewes with a great company,” “we came to Knole by coach at midnight.” ”

“ One luxury, indeed, she permitted herself: she smoked a pipe. Into all the details of her household she looked with a careful eye; already in the days when she was living at Knole she had used up Richard Dorset’s old shirts to make clouts, now at Appleby she saw to the preserving of fruit, she had her cheeses made at Brougham, sixteen at a time, she got her coal from her own pits, she had all delinquents into her own room and scolded them till they were probably thankful to be dismissed. ”

“ You have on Gainsborough’s canvas the beautiful, sensitive face of the gay and fickle duke, spoilt, feared, and propitiated by the women of London and Paris, the reputed lover of Marie Antoinette. You have his son, too fair and pretty a boy, the friend of Byron, killed in the hunting-field at the age of twenty-one, the last direct male of a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent, and too melancholy. ”

“ Conscientious as she is, she no longer finds enough events to justify a daily entry. Perhaps—who knows? for my part I strongly suspect it—her fighting spirit preferred even the ordeals and excitements of London to the tedium of Knole. She has very little to tell: only the gowns she wore, the books she read, the games she played with the steward, and the ailments of the Child.
At this time I wore a plain green flannel gown that William Pinn made me and my yellow taffety waistcoat. Rivers used to read to me in Montaigne’s Essays, and Moll Neville in the Fairy Queen. ”

“ Backed up by her family, she would have felt herself backed up by the whole of the English middle-class, cushioned, solid in the consciousness of its homogeneity and resources, an enormous family of Jennings, swarming in every town and with its place of assembly in every town-hall, inimical to the exotic, mistrustful of the new, tenacious of the conventions that were as cement to its masonry; a class sagacious and shrewd, nicely knowing safety from danger, and knowing, above all, its own mind, since nothing was ever admitted to that mind to which it could not immediately affix a label. ”

“ He shook his head in refusal. “Cruel to me, Nicholas; and my own son too: cruel and hard; he bullies us both....” Lovel shut the door and went downstairs, but the mumble of her complaining pursued him still.
Olver crouched by the fire between the dogs, his curls almost as matted as their pelt. He eyed his brother from under his brows, as though he expected to be scolded. Lovel however only said quietly, “I shall remain at home to-morrow, and if you choose you can go to the Manor House for me.” ”