Only DICKENS or THACKERAY could have rivaled the following sketch of a discussion on
"'What do you mean, Mr. Mackaye!' asked I, with a doleful and disappointed visage.
"'Mean--why, if God had meant ye to write about Pacifics, He'd ha put ye there--and because He means ye to write aboot London town, He's put ye there--and gien ye an unco sharp taste o' the ways o't; and I'll gie ye anither. Come along wi' me.'
"And he seized me by the arm, and hardly giving me time to put on my hat, marched me out into the streets, and away through Clare Market to St. Giles's.
"It was a foul, chilly, foggy Saturday night. From the butchers' and greengrocers' shops the gas-lights flared and flickered, wild and ghastly, over haggard groups of slip-shod, dirty women, bargaining for scraps of stale meat, and frost-bitten vegetables, wrangling about short weight and bad quality. Fish-stalls and fruit-stalls lined the edge of the greasy pavement, sending up odors as foul as the language of the sellers and buyers. Blood and sewer-water crawled from under doors and out of spouts, and reeked down the gutters among offal, animal and vegetable, in every stage of putrefaction. Foul vapors rose from cow-sheds and slaughter-houses, and the doorways of undrained alleys, where the inhabitants carried the filth out on their shoes from the back yard into the court, and from the court up into the main street; while above hanging like cliffs over the streets--those narrow, brawling torrents of filth, and poverty, and sin--the houses with their teeming load of life were piled up into the dingy choking night. A ghastly, deafening, sickening sight it was. Go, scented Belgravian! and see what London is! and then go to the library which God has given thee--one often fears in vain--and see what science says this London might be!
"'Ay,' he muttered to himself, as he strode along, 'sing awa; get yoursel' wi' child wi' pretty fancies and gran' words, like the rest of the poets, and gang to hell for it.'
"'Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie--a warse ane than ony fiend's' kitchen, or subterranean Smithfield that ye'll hear o' in the pulpits--the hell on earth o' being a flunkey, and a humbug, and a useless peacock, wasting God's gifts on your ain lusts and pleasures--and kenning it--and not being able to get oot o' it, for the chains o' vanity and self-indulgence. I've warned ye. Now look there--'