thing in being the first to set up this model
stage, with all its beautiful resources and
devices, within the walls of an English theatre.

SILENT HIGHWAY-MEN.

It does not require one to be much of a
philosopher broadly to define that we have our
partialities as well as our dislikes, and that we
are generally as irrational in one as the other.
As the wildest of madmen will talk with
perfect sense and fluency until asked what has
become of Julius Cæsar, or what soft soap is
made of, when he will suddenly break out
into rabid fury and incoherent bellowings, so
can I listen with placid smiles to the
narrated idiosyncrasies of my friends, meeting
each account with placid smile or acquiescent
shrug; but if by ill chance the subject of The
Silent Highway be touched upon offensively, I
break forth and lose my head at once. The Thames
is my mania, my love for it the absorbing passion
of my life. It is the only one weapon with which
I beat my provincial acquaintances and foreign
visitors. They come and stay with me and
abuse my place of abode. The provincial says
he cannot breathe, the Frenchman says he has
the spleen, the German inflates his many-plaited
shirt-front, and bellows, "Ach Gott! was für
eine Luft!" and the Italian sighs heavily, and
pantomimically searches for the sun. When I
show them St. Paul's, they shrug, muttering of
Notre-Dame, of the Cologne Dom, of St.
Peter's at Rome, of II Duomo at Milan; when I
take them through Trafalgar-square, they roar,
immediately instituting comparisons between
that monstrous national disgrace and the glorious
Place de la Concorde of Paris, the Unter den
Linden, or the Schloss Platz of Berlin, the St.
Stephen's Platz of Vienna, the Piazza di St.
Pietro at Rome, the Piazza del Granduca at
Florence, or the Piazza S. Marco at Venice.
The Monument is a standing joke for them, and
all the London statues are exquisite themes for
ribaldry. They sneer at our theatres, they laugh
at our church-architecture, they are impressed
with nothing at all, except it be Madame
Tussaud's waxwork, until I take them on the
Thames. Then I hold them!

Dirty is Father Thames, I grant! thick, yellow,
turbid, occasionally evil smelling; but I love him
none the less. I know him where he is pure and
cleanly, at near-lying Richmond and lock-bound
Teddington; at decorous Hampton and quaint
old-fashioned Sunbury and Chertsey; by pretty
Maidenhead and quaker Staines; at Pangbourne,
Goring, and Streightly, than which three there
are not, I opine, any lovelier spots in this lovely
country; at monastic Medmenham, and red-faced
Henley, far away down to the spot where the
banks echo with the time-kept strokes of the
racing eight, and the river runs merrily past old
Oxford town. I know him throughout; but I
love him best in his own special territory,
frowned upon by the great gaunt black
warehouses, the dreary river-side public-houses, the
huge brewery palaces, the shot-towers, the dock-
houses, the dim grey Tower of London, the
congregationless City churches, the clanging
factories, the quiet Temple, the plate-glass works, the
export Scotch and Irish merchants, the cheese-
factors' premises, the cement wharves, the sugar
consignees' counting-houses, the slimy slippery
landing-places, the atmosphere of which is here
sticky with molasses, there dusty with flour, and
a little way further off choky with particles of
floating wool. Make your embankments, if you
like; lay down your level road duly granited
and palisaded off from the river, and lined with
buildings of equal height and of the same
monotonous architecture; but, before you do
that, you will have to clear away hundreds of
little poky dirty streets of a peculiar speciality
nowhere else to be met with—streets which are
as thoroughly maritime as Hamilton Moore's
Treatise on Navigation, or the bottom of a
corvette that has been for three years on the
West India station—streets filled with outfitters,
sail-makers, ship-chandlers; bakers of ship
biscuit, makers of ship chronometers, sextants,
and quadrants; sellers of slop Guernseys, and
pea-jackets, and sou'-westers; lenders of money
on seamen's advance-notes; buyers of parrots
and cockatoos, thin Trichinopoly cheroots, guava
jelly, and Angostura bitters from home-returning
Jack.

Look at my Thames, Historicus! and you will
have little difficulty in calling before your mind's
eye the old days when she was the Silent Highway
for all, from the monarch taking water at
Westminster, to the prisoner floating in at
Traitor's Gate; when Richard the Second,
floated in his tapestried barge, and seeing Gower
the poet, called him on board, and bade him
"make a book after his best," whence arose the
Confessio Amantis; when Wolsey, giving up
York Place, "took his barge at his privy stairs,
and so went by water to Putney;" when Sir
Thomas More, abandoning his chancellorship
and his state, gave up his barge and his eight
watermen to Sir Thomas Audley, his successor;
when James the Second, flying from his throne,
embarked at Whitehall, as old Evelyn records
in his Diary: "I saw him take barge—a sad
sight." Time after time the oars cleave the
waters, the swift wherries hurry towards the
water postern of the Tower, the warder stands
erect in the bows flouting the thick darkness
with his flaming torch, the bearded guards lean
negligently on their halberds, and in the midst
sit the prisoners; now, courtly Essex, or grave-
faced Raleigh; now, Northumberland, or
vacillating Dudley, or gentle Lady Jane Grey. The
Traitor's Gate opens, and the Constable of the
Tower receives them at the stairs; then the
hurried trial, the sentence, and the early morning
when the black-visored headsman does his work.

As in a dissolving view, gone is the grim old
Traitor's Gate; and, in its place, rises a rotunda
with a Doric portico, an arcade, and a gallery
outside, a Venetian pavilion in the centre of a
lake, and grounds planted with trees and allées
verts. This is Ranelagh, and the Silent Highway