Miscellaneous writings of the late Dr. Maginn :: :: University of Virginia Library

Muggy, and moist, and slob, and slippery!
It wants an hour of sunrise; and the rain
Pours down in torrents, and in splashing showers
Fills every gutter, steaming with perfume,
Rank and indelicate confoundedly.
Shrouded in which, as in a frouzy night-cap,

164

Lies the new-woke and cabbage-laded garden,
Conscious once more of market-hour's approach.
No object all around me is unsoaked—
Carts, gardeners, ladies, turnip-tops, police,
Soused through and through, swear (such of them as can)
In strong expression of the rapped-out oath.
Alive is every potatory tap,
Wine-vaults or cellar, with their pewter pots
And ruin azure-hued; while blandly smiles,
Hearing the coppers on the counter roll,
The trim-capped bar-maid; and the coves, enwreathed
With ladies of the night, brimful of gin,
Stagger along in lushy state, and fill
The air with odors, from the shortened pipe
Puffed frequently; and many a wandering bird,
'Neath the piazzas whispers words of love
To knight or squire, in blissful drunkenness,
Who sees a double beauty in her eyes.
There, beside one small round of deal-board, sit
A crew of costermongers, happy all
With their mundungus mild, and heavy-wet;
And here, safe stored beneath yon canvass awning,

165

An inexhaustible hoard of cabbages,
Heaped up against the dinner-hour's demand—
Doomed as companion to the beef, or boiled
Or stewed, or cooked in manners manifold—
Messes which tailors love to feed upon.
And, lo! yon watch-house, lying by the church,
Choke-full almost—yet all the while still filling
With importations of disorderlies,
Kicking up rows and shindies far and wide,
And all descriptions of loose characters
Cramming and crowding, till the lock-up room
Sweats with the foes of order; like the land
Where Newman Knollys sends his chosen flock;
And many a blowen of saloonic fame,
Sold to a Sydney settler, is beloved
In patriarchal wise: spite of that love,
Oft is her seven years' sojourn dimmed with tears,
Shed when she thinks on spots which, since the hour
The ruthless beaks took her to trap away,
Have seen, unvisited by her, the lark,
Morning and evening; or upon her pals,
Who oft, since she was lagged, have, side by side,

166

In many a boozing ken, drank, morn and night,
Ay, all on to the moonlight starriness,
Without once knowing that there was a sky.
Muggy, and moist, and slob, and slippery!
A multitudinous host of coffee-shops!
And lo! the Finish opens to receive
The remnants of the night. Black horsebeans now
Are flowing, coffee-like, with plenteous grounds;
And there are goings-on of human life
In Bow Street, Hart Street, James Street, White Hart Yard,
Behind green window-blinds and yellow curtains.
And from his beat the blue-coat Peeler sees
And hears the stagger of Corinthian,
Singing and shouting, as he scarcely seems
To touch the ground with his unsteady foot,
And at the last, laid level by a trip,
Drops, in full dress, his person in the mud.

167

Murphy! its magic lies upon thee now,
The power of Daffy—she it is who bathes
With ruin blue as is an angel's eye
Whate'er your rolling optics look upon!
By many an intermediate link of thought
It joins that family of brick and stone,
In strange relationship, till the curb-stone,
Flanked by the puddle, the mud-girded pavement
Where heroes, done by draughts of Deady, sleep,
Is mingled with the chimney pinnacle
From which yon speck—it is a sweep—sings out.
Silent in nature is the unwakened street,
For all its coves are snoring fast asleep:
But in his daffy-stricken ear a sound
Thunders as if a hundred wagons rolled.
Where are his pot companions? In dark traps
Locked up, some look for Bow-Street in the morn.
Of others the imprisoned form is seen
By the gruff turnkey as he shoots the bolt
Of Newgate, looking o'er Snow Hill below.

168

But he beholdeth, and he heareth all
Their chanting and their chaff—the flowing lush,
Their pints of heavy—glorying in his soul
On their sunshiny feats of crackmanship;
Or thinking gloomy of the scragging hour,
When Cotton's signal sends their swinging bulk
Dancing on nothing in a hempen cravat,
That makes its wearer grin like Samuel Rogers.
An Irish row!
St. Giles's! where the Cork and Kerry men
Come down in lashings out of Lawrence Lane.
Gossoons from Iveragh, O'Connell's land,
Or sweet St. Barry's steeple-crowned hill,
Thundering to men of Connaught, or of Leinster,
To take a leathering that will do them good.
The challenged onward sweep, a hundred boys,
Shillelah-furnished from the Rose and Crown,
Or Jem M'Govern's crib in Buckridge Street:

169

Met in mid way, up gets a quiet fight,
Each separate lad knocking his neighbor down;
Soon the storm-loving heroes spread the fray
From Dyot Street to Broad Street, the career
Marked out by broken heads. Down sink the polls
Of Jerry Kearney, or Tim Gollogher,
Smote by the tempest shower of ash plants dried,
Or flying stones—once pavement of the street—
Now flung in rocky war. The gathering fight
In the long battering 'twixt the Dublin coves
And the big broguineers of Munster land,
Through those Elysian groves, burst in each lane
Into a hundred other smaller rows;
Till, lo! subdued by saplings of the South,
(Whence potent whiskey flows, though mild to taste)
Down sink the men of Erin east and west,
Insensibly knocked up by knocking down.
And all along the ancient ground of fight

170

Out come the night-capped women to the fray,
Squalling advice of quiet to the boys,
Leathering or leathered, and remove their husbands
In Irish fashion—killed. The first-risen Pat
Beholds next morn his much-loved Holy Land
All strewn with mud and blood, and sticks and stones,
And wigs and hats, which hats can be no more.

Anglicè, boys: from the French garçon. As long as a man can fight, in Ireland, he is called a boy.

Hotels in St. Giles's, the Grillons and Clarendons of the district.

173

So to the bar they come—the close girt bar,
Thither conducted by a brace of traps,
And no mistake ------
[OMITTED]
------and cheek by jowl,
Placed on their perch, distinctly visible,
The sisters stand awhile, then leaning over,
Blow up the officers in words of slang
Like fun; and keep their game eyes steadily
Fixed on Sir Richard's mug.

One phiz is pale
In its own pockmarkedness, but paler seems
Beneath the border of her unwashed cap,
So sooty-black, contrasting with the red,
Deep-seated, of her well-carbuncled nose,
Kept purple by her drams. The other foxy
As ruddiest reynard, and bedaubed with rouge,
In rivalry of all those uncombed locks,
Like carrots glittering, o'er her breadth of face
Afloat, and from her eyes, some twice a minute,
Pushed back with greasy hand. But, oh! those eyes
Black all around, but as you closer gaze
Yellower and yellower grows the spreading circle
That girds around each twinkling orb, befringed

174

With eyelids almost closed upon the eye,
And reddened by the constant lush of Booth.

Barney Moore, a Vision of Covent Garden and St. Giles's. By Bryan O'Toole, Esq., of Gray's Inn. In ten Visions. Visions I. and II.; 4to. Buckman, London.