- end_line
- 6433
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T03:48:16.153Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 6365
- text
- Avoiding the main entrance of the hall, which was barred, he took me
through some private way, and we found ourselves in a rear blind-walled
place in the open air. I looked round amazed. The spot was grimy as a
backyard in the Five Points. It was packed with a mass of lean,
famished, ferocious creatures, struggling and fighting for some
mysterious precedency, and all holding soiled blue tickets in their
hands.
‘There is no other way,’ said my guide; ‘we can only get in with the
crowd. Will you try it? I hope you have not on your drawing-room suit?
What do you say? It will be well worth your sight. So noble a charity
does not often offer. The one following the annual banquet of Lord
Mayor’s day--fine a charity as that certainly is--is not to be mentioned
with what will be seen to-day. Is it, ay?’
As he spoke, a basement door in the distance was thrown open, and the
squalid mass made a rush for the dark vault beyond.
I nodded to my guide, and sideways we joined in with the rest. Ere long
we found our retreat cut off by the yelping crowd behind, and I could
not but congratulate myself on having a civic, as well as civil guide;
one, too, whose uniform made evident his authority.
It was just the same as if I were pressed by a mob of cannibals on some
pagan beach. The beings round me roared with famine. For in this mighty
London misery but maddens. In the country it softens. As I gazed on the
meagre, murderous pack, I thought of the blue eye of the gentle wife of
poor Coulter. Some sort of curved, glittering steel thing (not a sword;
I know not what it was), before worn in his belt, was now flourished
overhead by my guide, menacing the creatures to forbear offering the
stranger violence.
As we drove, slow and wedge-like, into the gloomy vault, the howls of
the mass reverberated. I seemed seething in the Pit with the Lost. On
and on, through the dark and the damp, and then up a stone stairway to a
wide portal; when, diffusing, the pestiferous mob poured in bright day
between painted walls and beneath a painted dome. I thought of the
anarchic sack of Versailles.
A few moments more and I stood bewildered among the beggars in the
famous Guildhall.
Where I stood--where the thronged rabble stood, less than twelve hours
before sat His Imperial Majesty, Alexander of Russia; His Royal Majesty,
Frederick William, King of Prussia; His Royal Highness, George, Prince
Regent of England; His world-renowned Grace, the Duke of Wellington;
with a mob of magnificoes made up of conquering field-marshals, earls,
counts, and innumerable other nobles of mark.
The walls swept to and fro, like the foliage of a forest with blazonings
of conquerors’ flags. Naught outside the hall was visible. No windows
were within four-and-twenty feet of the floor. Cut off from all other
sights, I was hemmed in by one splendid spectacle--splendid, I mean,
everywhere, but as the eye fell toward the floor. _That_ was foul as a
hovel’s--as a kennel’s; the naked boards being strewed with the smaller
and more wasteful fragments of the feast, while the two long parallel
lines, up and down the hall, of now unrobed, shabby, dirty pine-tables
were piled with less trampled wrecks. The dyed banners were in keeping
with the last night’s kings; the floor suited the beggars of to-day. The
banners looked down upon the floor as from his balcony Dives upon
Lazarus. A line of liveried men kept back with their staves the
impatient jamb of the mob, who, otherwise, might have instantaneously
converted the Charity into a Pillage. Another body of gowned and gilded
officials distributed the broken meats--the cold victuals and crumbs of
kings. One after another the beggars held up their dirty blue tickets,
and were served with the plundered wreck of a pheasant, or the rim of a
pasty--like the detached crown of an old hat--the solids and meats
stolen out.
- title
- Chunk 1