for them; the anomalous well-dressed,
watch-chained, clean-shaven class, who seem
to make it a pretext of having "business
in the city" to consume bowls of
soup at the Cock in Threadneedle Street,
or sandwiches and sherry at Garraway's;—
little do these harmless votaries of Mammon
reck of the existence of a sulphureous subterranean
in the vicinity, where Mammon
strips off his gold-laced coat and cocked hat;
sends Dei Gratiâ packing; and puts on his
proper livery of horns and hoofs and a tail;
where the innocuous veal pie in Birch the pastrycook's
window in Cornhill casts off its
crust—has four legs, horns, and a yellow
coat, and stands on a pedestal—the Golden
Calf—in—the place I won't mention to ears
polite.

Under Capel Court, where the lame ducks,
the disembodied spirits of ruined stockbrokers
hover, like phantoms, on the banks
of the Styx with no halfpenny to pay their
ferry-boat over, there is a staircase—foul,
stony, precipitous and dark—like one in a
station-house or the poor side of a debtors'
prison. Such establishments have no monopoly
of underground staircases like these
that lead from life and liberty to squalor,
misery, and captivity. At the bottom of the
staircase there is a board that some misanthropic
brewer has cast into the pit (hoping to
find it eventually), relative to entire porter
and sparkling ales. Placards also, telling of
wines and spirits, are as distinct as the
gloominess of a place rivalling a coal-cellar in
obscurity and a bear-pit in savagery, will
allow them to be. This place is a public-house
and—well, let us compromise the
matter, and call it Hades.

You have very little opportunity of judging
what the place is like inside. You only
know that it is dark and full of smoke and
men. Walls, bar, chairs, tables, drinking-vessels
must be of little account when the
noblest study of mankind—being, as it is well
known, man—man, compasses you round
about, a smoking, drinking, whiskered,
hoarse, squabbling, shrieking crowd. Here
a boastful buck, all rings and rags. Here
rags in their unadulterated condition, but
laced with grease and slashed with prospectuses
and share-lists. Here roguery, in luck,
with clothes all too new, and that will become
old before their time, acting the cheap
Amphytrion in beer and pipes. Here carcasses
without gibbets and gibbets without
carcasses looking hungrily upon those who
feed. Here utter broken-down misery:
hunger that was once well-fed—that has lent
to many, but is ashamed to borrow; perfect
poverty that has no game up—no little caper
—that is not fly to anything—that has no
irons in the fire—that knows no parties—that
can put you up to no first-rate moves—that
is not waiting for a chance or to see its way,
or something to turn up, but is only too glad
to warm itself at an eleemosynary fire, and
inhale the fumes of other men's tobacco, and
wrap itself as in a garment with the steam of the
fried onions of the more prosperous, and brood
quietly in a corner of this Bartholomew Lane
Hades, ever remembering that it is a beggar,
and that it was once worth a hundred thousand
pounds.

You that have heard of commercial manias,
and that they are periodical, don't believe in
their transient nature. There is always a
Mania. Speculation never lulls. When thousands
are shy, sixpence halfpenny offers.
Mammon tempers the wind to the shorn
speculator. There is always something up.
Thus in this Hades when railways are flat,
there is always something to be done in gold
mines. When the auriferous veins run short,
there are nice little pickings to be got out of
amalgamated companies for the exploitation
of coal; strata of which are always found
in the very nick of time somewhere where
they were never heard or dreamed of before.
Should the yield of the black diamond prove
unremunerative, a rich vein of lead is sure to
turn up at those famous Pyngwylly-Tuddyllyg
mines in Wales, where lead has been promising
for so many years, and has swallowed up
so many thousand pounds in red gold, and
driven so many Welsh squires to madness,
or the Bankruptcy Court. Copper (somewhere
between Honolulu and Vancouver's
Island), or quicksilver (anywhere in the
Sou-west-by-eastern latitudes) can scarcely
fail when lead is scarce. When metals are
at a discount, Land Companies; Emigration
Companies; Extra-Economical Gas Companies,
to give consumers gas (in their own
pipes) at a penny farthing per thousand feet;
Economical Funeral Companies—a shroud, a
leaden coffin, mutes with silk scarves, gloves,
hatbands, cake and wine, and a tombstone
surmounted by a beautiful sculptured allegory
of the three Graces inciting the trumpet
of Fame to sound the praises of the domestic
Virtues all for three pound ten; Economical
Hotel Companies—beds free, breakfasts gratis,
wax candles for nothing, and no charge for
waiters—Loan Societies, lending any amount
of money on personal security at nominal
rates of interest; Freehold Land and Building
Societies, by subscribing to which (no
fines, no stoppages, no entrance money), parties
can become their own landlords—dwelling
in houses as big as Count Walewski's at Albert
Gate, and walking fifty miles per diem, if
they choose, on their own land—in the short
space of three months from day of enrolment;
Guarantee Societies for securing merchants
and bankers against dishonest clerks, landlords
from non-rent paying tenants, sheep
from the rot, pigs from the measles, feet
from corns, drunkards from red noses, and
quiet, country parsonages from crape-masked
burglars. Such, and hundreds more such
companies are always somehow in the market,
susceptible of being quoted, advertised, and
bruited about in Hades. There are always