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THE LONELY MAN OF LAMBETH;

OR, QUITE THE GENTLEMAN.

BY CORNELIUS WEBBE.

In one of the most ancient neighbourhoods of the goodly city of Westminster, running parallel, as it does with it, along the opposite shore of the Thames, there is half-a-mile, the most picturesque portion of the human habitations which, massed together, make up this mightiest of all metropolitan cities. In old times, through the place we have to depicture, ran a narrow bridle-road among marshes and meadows often overflowed, which, commencing its course at the Southwark side of old London Bridge, went winding along Bankside by the Bear Garden and the Globe Theatre, where the greatest poet of the world" played his part," turned as the river turned, and still went on, until at length it passed through Pedlar's Acre; and then, leaving for awhile the shore it had so long followed, it rounded Stangate Creek, then a considerable confluent of the Thames, and, forming what is called Carlisle Lane, left Old Lambeth Church and its priestly palace behind, and struck downwards to the shore and through the ancient neighbourhood we have already indicated; and threading through it, it reached at last the open fields of Battersea, which make the shore of Surrey marshy and rushy, and formerly unculturable, and there it ended.

Leaving this old road to wander as it would, we will retrace our steps, and come back to the site of our story. Side by side with this old roadway ran a long, narrow lane of low-roofed, ill-built huts and houses with overhanging stories, toppling gables, and doors to which you descended, inhabited mostly by poor fishermen, and men whose business was upon the waters. To the left lay the country-houses of the retired citizens of those days, still clinging to the skirts of the town where they had won their wealth. These dignified the once-pleasant neighbourhood of Vauxhall and still beautiful South Lambeth, leaving their low and poor neighbour behind them. As their neighbour was in old times so is it now, save that its once-habitable tenements are nodding to their fall," while others have fallen; and the place is now partly deserted by the hardy, industrious race of men who once made it populous, and manufacturers of all sorts of noxious and nauseous things have taken possession of the shore, and house after house, if not used by them as shut-up stores for their goods, is empty, open to the wind and the rain and the houseless vagabond, doorless some, windowless others; while, here and there, one more weather-tight is still inhabited by one of the race of Simon Peter, and men of like callings, who find the spot convenient for their business. The entire extent of this rude street, as it is called, presents one of the most picturesque scenes of decay and desolation, of industry and idleness, of compact habitations and crazy ruins, that can be seen in the suburbs of London, where ground is commonly too valuable to lie useless, and even the old materials of buildings are of more worth than to be left to crumble away, and walls and timbers to pull themselves down. It is amusing to look at the grotesque attitudes of these superannuated structures. One with top-heavy upper stories juts so far over the street, that a child can barely walk under its projecting second story. Another inclines so far

forward as to shut out half your sight of what is beyond it. Another leans as far backward, as if careful, when it comes down with the run, as come it will at no distant day, not to harm the few walkers that way. One lounges to the right, another to the left. Not a doorpost in one of them stands upright. If you could open one of these doors, undarkened now by the entrance of anything human, it is doubtful whether you could shut it without shaking the house down on your adventurous head. The windows, as distorted, hang out and in all directions. As the winter wind sweeps up this dreary avenue their shattered casements shake out their last panes upon the stones, and seem easier for the effort. As you look upward through the open windows you perceive that the roofs have fallen in, and that the chimneys look ready to fall in the first tempest that visits them too roughly. Never was seen, in the precincts of a great city unvisited by war, or made a desert by plague, pestilence, and famine, a spot so forlorn, forsaken, and unregarded. The march of improvement has not taken this direction, and it is neglected perhaps only because it is unknown. One wonders, while walking through this waste, who owns it, or whether he is ashamed to own it. It is a proof that, however humble its few residents are, they are honest, or the wood of these no-man's houses would have been pulled away for firing, the windows taken out for their old lead and iron, and their ancient walls undermined for their bond-timbers. No one, however, touches them but passing time and the tempest; and they are left to stand till they fall of utter decay, and are unable to hold up any longer.

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Here and there, as we have said, one of these houses is habitable. At its door the poor fisherman may be seen seated on a pile of fishbaskets mending his nets, or stretching them along the walls to dry. Here and there, too, the boatwright is seen patching and piecing the old cobles and peter-boats of his poor employers as cheaply as he can, or paying" their gaping seams and sides on terms which barely pay him, as he says. When you fall in with none of these, the spot seems wholly deserted for the manufacturers who occupy the farther end of the street are all busy within doors, and solitude keeps the place, if not silence. You hear a faint stir of movement somewhere, but see nothing of it. The shivering sound of axe or adze striking into wood comes from you know not where. The heavy plunge of some huge engine, shaking the very ground you tread over, is among those shut-up places, but no signs of life are visible to tell you where. A few paces farther, and these ruinous dwellings have their inhabitants. A young fisherwife is at her door in the sun, employed in needle-work. Another is dandling a healthy child, who catches its breath, and crows, and laughs as she cants it into the air. Another is looking out, with her eyes shadowed by her hand, for the coming home of her good man. There are few children seen: for the older boys are out in the boats with their fathers; the younger are on the shore at play, the tide being down, or are gathering the drift wood which every tide leaves kindly on the sands. The girls, if old enough, are out at service, or else employed at home out of sight. As a straggling stranger up this out-of-the-way avenue is a novelty, all the ears that hear his unusual footsteps, and all the eyes that catch sight of his unaccustomed figure passing their everopen doors or poor windows, patched with paper and stuffed with old stockings, are directed towards him and watch his motions; and much

wonder is awakened as to what he can want in wandering there. The industrious housewife suspends her work to stare at him. The old woman, who is past toil, leans over her half-hatched door, and with noddling head, palsy-stricken, looks on him as on some foreign wonder, and adjusting her spectacles on her nose, throws her head back, and looks at him as though she looked at something over his head. The place is so unfrequented by strangers, that it is no marvel that one curiously surveying it should create a sensation. It lies so out of the way of chance visitors, that he who is now describing it has lived many years at one end of it, and knew not of its existence till lately, when accident discovering it, he traced out this terra incognita, and has here attempted to describe it.

It was with similar circumstances of curiosity on all sides of him that, on a summer afternoon, some seven years since, a tall and venerable man was seen wandering up and down this isolated spot, examining house after house, as though seeking to find one in particular. As he came to one more desolate than the rest, he seemed to contemplate, with more than the curious eye of the antiquary, the once happy home of how many generations of human beings, and then walked musingly on. It was noticed that the largest and most ancient houses took up most of his attention. When before one of these, he placed himself as close as he could against the wall opposite, and gazed at it from gable-top to the step of the low-sunken door, examining it and considering its condition more than curiously. As he passed the more modern and more tottering houses he shook his head, and passed on to the next, older and firmer in its foundations, and sounder in its constitution in all respects. At length he came to a quaint old house, with four gables facing the cardinal points, windows like slits, long, narrow lattices, outer walls rudely plastered and crossed with timbers, an old doorway with ornamented posts, and altogether of an aspect superior to its neighbours, which seemed to please him mightily, for he stood looking on it for some time, and measuring with his eye its height and depth and breadth. He stopped so long before it, indeed, as to give the nearest resident time to come up with him, and examine him as curiously. Having hemmed twice to attract the stranger's attention, he turned as he wished towards the old fisherman, as his jacket and long boots showed him to be, and inquired of the man whether this house was to let, and what for, who was its landlord? which questions the fisherman answered, after first humbly touching his hat in compliment to the gentleman, and the key of the old house being kept at his cottage, he stepped back for it, and opening the outer door for the first time these ten years, entered the deserted place, and went all over it; and "the old gentleman-quite the old gentleman!" as the fisherman ever afterwards described him, being well-pleased with it, took down the name of its landlord, went his way, and was seen there no more for many weeks. When conjecture who he was, and what he wanted with such a house in such a neighbourhood, a gentleman like him, had gone to sleep again, he suddenly re-appeared, said he had taken the house, took the key of it to begin with, and the next morning, as early as six o'clock, the whole lone neighbourhood was alarmed by hearing noises all about the old house as though it were haunted by the ghosts of sundry carpenters knocking anything but spiritual with no ghostly hammers into the old floor, which sounded like substantial

planking certainly. The whole community of that place had ears, but that which they heard was not believed, it sounded so improbable; the ears had eyes, and these again bodies, and these had legs and feet; for ere many nails were driven into the places pointed out for them by a gimlet of insinuating manners, there were as many wide-open eyes and mouths gaping and staring into the wide open passage as were otherwise unoccupied. Nothing now was seen, though much was heard going on within. One of these listeners thought she heard a saw, if ever she heard one in her life, go, in the most saw-like way in the world, through a board, in a way indeed quite beyond the powers of imitation of any ghost of a saw out of the world; and listening again, heard a sneeze, and saws do not sneeze; and listening again, heard something snap, and something swear, and though saws snap a tooth at times, they are too moral to swear at it. It was this acute woman who at last ventured to walk boldly and bodily in, and there, sure enough, she saw with her own eyes, she would not have believed any other, what looked like three visible broad backs in white flannel jackets, with something surmounting their collars, wrapped up in whity-brown paper, which went jerking and bobbing up and down as heads do in sawing. She next looked at the nether parts of these phantoms, and there was not a hoof among the three, that she could see. Suddenly this sawing ceased, and the rapping of nails on the head was resumed. All these sounds and sights seemed anything but spiritual, and yet still she had her fears, till one of these mysterious beings, in tones not unearthly, wondered whether the Red Lion was open, for he wanted a pint of beer to cool his copper; and as she had never heard of ghosts taking to drinking at that hour in the morning, she ventured to cough, by way of letting these apparitions know that there were some people cognizant of their proceedings. This cough did draw off the attention of these carpenters-for she believed at last that they were carpenters-from their work, so slight a thing disturbs them when they are paid by the hour, and not by the piece: lifting up their heads, and wiping their warm foreheads with the back of their hands, they explained their conduct to the satisfaction of this jury of matrons. The result of the inquest was,—that the old house was let to somebody, and was to be repaired so as somebody could live in it -the old gentleman who was poking about the place, as sure as eggs are eggs; and there was much lifting up of eyes and hands in wonder how such a gentleman as he was to look at could come to live in such an outlandish place among poor people! It was conjectured that he had taken the house for some poor relation, perhaps, somebody whom he wished to bury alive, that he or she might be forgotten; or, perhaps, for an old housekeeper with the rheumatiz-what a place to bring her to-or, perhaps, for his old butler, troubled with the gout, that he might have water-carriage; or for some such poor cretur-it couldn't be for himself-no, he was too much the gentleman. The inquiry being so far settled, the carpenters-no ghosts by common consent-went on with their work; and at eight, when they wanted their breakfasts, they found that, even in that out-of-the-world place, among ruins and dilapidations, the Red Lion was open, and that they could breakfast on the usual terms, at whatever speed you please, whether you break fast or slow, according to the damage done. During their meal, old Johnny Dards, the fisherman who kept the key, made up his mind that it was

for some poor relation of the old gentleman they were repairing the floors of the old house. If he wanted to get rid of the poor cretur, the carpenters urged, he would have let the rotten boards alone, that he or she might break her or his neck, in hopes of a joyful resurrection, as soon as possible. John felt, notwithstanding this assurance, that he was justified in shaking his grey head in a reprobatory manner, and saying, "Ah, these great people! They don't mind what becomes of us little people no more than I do for the small flounders I throws in ag'in !" So conjectures went on till the carpenters went off the premises; the painters came on and went away alternately, like fits of the tertian ague, one day of painting to two of drying; and when the glazier was gone, the old house looked as smart as a young one. And by this time John had fixed on the gouty butler as the occupant. Yes, it was Snacks the butler, a mighty great and grand man in his day and way, who was thus quietly to be got out of his master's way as an eyesore. While out fishing alone he had several times seen him, with

a punchy man, with powdered hair, and a pigtail, and a terrible suspicion of poor people, that a silver spoon is never safe where they can

come.

Some days-not many-thereafter, a new sensation ran from end to end of the straggling street. Two long, lazy, leisurely, lumbering waggons, anything but ghostly, were seen awkwardly trying to poke in at the narrow entrance to that terra incognita, and at last succeeded, and slowly worked their way, which they fitted to a shaving, up to the old house, with two large loads of goods, such as never till that hour had graced that humble place. Every eye looked out for the gouty butler; and a countryman with corns was said to be the man, till somebody there, who had seen a butler, indignantly denied that those great officials ever dressed in smock-frocks, wore rough hats, redolent of old turnpike-tickets, and leather-leggings in communication with hobnailed highlows. No, he was not the butler-quite the reverse. Dards, too, had his doubts. He had made up his marine mind at last to see that despised slug among rich relations-a poor one; but he sought for him in vain. The goods-which were goods-were examined by that observant man who had seen a butler, and were by him said to be splendid, and fit for any gentleman's house in the land. And while Dards was looking at his own broad, brown, weather-beaten face in a large looking-glass, and was remarking that he wanted shaving, he saw a face not his looking over his shoulder, and felt the hand of " quite the gentleman" laid gently on it. He turned, and it was him sure enough. The stranger quietly asked him to assist in unloading the waggons, as his country agents were not perhaps so expert in handling fragile articles of furniture; a hint was given that he would be paid for his labour, and the goods were soon set down safe and sound as antiquity had left them in the last home of the mysterious man, their venerable owner. All the while these things were doing, uplifted hands and admiring eyes expressed the wonder of the poor residents how such furniture should come to settle in so humble a place; and a hundred speculations passed through their minds as to the life, character, and