A large crowd of people always presents many curious subjects of speculation. The bare fact of
their being there is marvellous in itself, when we come to think of it, without thinking too deeply.
As a rule, it is better to think, but not to think too deeply. If we don't think at all, our mind is but a
blank; if we just glance below the surface, we may without difficulty conjure up a host of pleasant
paradoxes, the contemplation of which is enough to keep the mind amused, and to give play to
a healthy and fanciful reflection. But if we think too deeply, we come to the reason of things—we
destroy our visionary castles—we brush away our quaint theories, and we reduce everything to
the absolute dead-level from which we started. Apply these remarks to a large crowd of
people—say a monster Reform gathering in Hyde Park. Here are thirty thousand people
vindicating their claim to the franchise, some by talking windily to a mob who can't hear them,
others by an interchange of gentle chaff, others by going to sleep on their backs on the grass.
The man who don't trouble himself to think about them accepts their presence as a fact which
is merely attributed to a popular demagogue and a few thousand handbills. He who dips
below the surface, finds a train of thoughts of this nature prepared for him: "How utterly
baseless is the doctrine of chances! Take any two of these people at random: one is (say) a
bricklayer, born in Gloucestershire; another is a tailor, who hails from Canterbury: well, what
would have been the betting, thirty years ago, that the Gloucestershire bricklayer would not be
lolling on the grass at Hyde Park, listening to the inflated nonsense of the Kentish tailor, at
eight o'clock on a given evening in August, eighteen hundred and sixty-seven? Why, the odds
would have been incalculably great against such a concurrence. But here are not only the
Gloucestershire bricklayer and the Kentish tailor, but also twenty-nine thousand nine hundred
and ninety-eight others, the odds against any one of whom meeting any other in the same
place, at the same time, and on the same day, would have been equally incalculable; and yet,
here they all are!" Here is a vast field of speculation opened out for the consideration of him
who only dips below the surface. It is enough, in itself, to keep his mind in a condition of
pleasant easy-going activity for months at a time. But the miserable man who sees a fallacy
in this chain of reasoning, and, so to speak, hauls up his intellectual cable to see where the
fault lies, discovers that it exists in the fact that no one, thirty years ago, prophesied anything
of the kind concerning either the Gloucester bricklayer or the Kentish tailor, or any other twain
of the multitude before him—that the odds against any one having prophesied such a
concurrence would be infinitely greater than the odds anybody would have staked against
such a prophecy being verified; that he has been troubling himself about a mass of utter
nonsense; and that, in the absense of any prophecy to that effect, there is nothing more
remarkable in the fact of the Gloucestershire bricklayer meeting the Kentish tailor and the
twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight other noodles who go to make up the
crowd, than is to be found in the fact that thirty thousand people can be brought together, out
of one city, who think that the cause of Reform is susceptible of any material advancement by
such a means.

The London streets always afford pleasant fund of reflection to a superficial thinker. Hardly a
man passes by who has not some more or less strongly marked characteristic which may
serve to distinguish him from his fellows, and give a clue to his previous history. Of course the
clue may be an erroneous one; but if it prove to be so, that is the fault of the sagacious soul
who follows it up too closely. Here is an instance taken at random. The easy-going speculator
who is content with such deductions as the light of nature may enable him to make, sets him
down as a thriving bill-discounter. He is an old gentleman who has, at various epochs in his
chequered career, been a wine-merchant, a cigar-dealer, a Boulogne billiard player, a
trafficker in army commissions, a picture-dealer, a horse-dealer, a theatrical manager, and a
bill discounter. Each of these occupations has left its mark, more or less emphasized, upon his
personal appearance. He finds bill-discounting by far the most profitable of his employments,
and he sticks to it. He has a large army connection, and can tell off the encumberances on
most of the large landed estates of Great Britain and Ireland. He has a fine cellar of old wines,
and several warehouses of cigars and old masters—commodities which enter largely into all
his discounting transactions. He has a large house, and gives liberal parties, and it is
astonishing (considering his antecedents) how many young men of family find it worth while to
"show up" at them.

Here we have Mr. Sam Travers of the metropolitan theatres. Mr, Sam Travers is a stock low
comedian at a favorite minor establishment, and Mr. Sam Travers's pre-occupied demeanour
and unreasonable galvanic smiles suggest that his next new part is the most prominent subject
matter of his reflections. Mr. Travers was a music-hall singer and country clown until his
developing figure interfered with the latter line of business, and he has now subsided into the
"comic countryman" of the establishment to which he is attached. His notions of "make up" are
for the most part limited to a red wig and a nose to match; but he is a "safe" actor, and on his
appearance on the stage the gallery hail him by name as one man. He can't pass a man with
a red head and red nose without exclaiming, "By Jove! there's a bit of character, eh!" and he
falls into the mistake, too common among his class, of supposing that a man who looks, in the
streets, as if he had been "made up" for the stage, is on that account characteristic and to be
carefully imitated.

A wicked old character is represented in the initial to this paper. He is a gay old bachelor, of
disgraceful habits and pursuits—a coarse old villain without a trace of gentlemanly, or even
manly, feeling about him. He stands at his club-window by day, leering at every respectable
woman who passes him, in a manner that would insure him a hearty kicking were he not the
enfeebled, palsied old thing he is. At dinner he drinks himself into a condition of drivelling
imbecility, from which he arouses himself in time to stagger round to the nearest stage-door.
His income is probably derived from the contributions of disgusted connections who pay him
to keep out of their sight, and when he dies, he will die, unattended, in a Duke Street
lodging-house, whose proprietor will resent the liberty as openly as he dares.

Here is an amusing fellow—an artistic charlatan. He is by profession an artist; his "get up" is
astonishingly professional, and his talk is studio slang. He never paints anything, but haunts
studios, and bothers hard-working craftsmen by the hour together. He has been all over the
world, and knows every picture in every gallery in Europe. To hear him talk, you would think he
was the acknowledged head of his profession. Certainly, as far as his exterior goes, there
never was so artistic an artist (out of a comedy) as he.

Bound, I should say, for rehearsal. Much more quiet and ladylike than people who only know
her from the stalls, as a popular burlesque prince, would expect her to be. A good quiet girl
enough, with a bedridden mother and three or four clean but seedy little children dependent
on her weekly salary (eked out, perhaps, by dancing and music lessons) for their daily bread.
Very little does she know about Ascot drags and Richmond dinners: her life is a quiet round of
regular unexciting duties, only relieved at distant intervals by the flash and flutter of a new part.
She will marry, perhaps, the leader of the band, or the stage-manager, or the low comedian,
grow fat, and eventually train pupils for the stage.

Ah! his story, past and to come, is easily told. Bank clerk by day—casino reveller by night,
eventually a defaulter; three years' penal servitude, ticket of leave [license given to a convict
under imprisonment to go at large and labor for himself], then a billiard marker and betting
man, and if successful, perhaps a small cigar-shop keeper. Or, if he has relations, his passage
may be paid out to Australia, where he will begin as an attorney's clerk and perhaps end as a
judge. Most of us have some great original whom we set up as a type of what a man should be,
and that selected by our friend is the "great Vance." He frames his costume from the outsides
of comic songs, and his air and conversation are of the slap-bang order of architecture. His
clothes and those of his friends are always new—offensively new—a phenomenon which is not
easily accounted for when the limited nature of their finances is taken into consideration. I have
a theory that they are clothed gratuitously by West-end tailors who want to get up a fashionable
reaction in the matter of gentlemen's dress, and who think that this end may be most readily
attained by clothing such men as these in exaggerations of existing fashions. But this is just one
of those speculations to which I have alluded to at some length, and which on closer investigation
I feel I should be tempted to reject. So I decline to pursue the subject.

A London crowd is an awful thing, when you reflect upon the number of infamous characters of
which it is necessarily composed. I don't care what crowd it is—whether it is an assemblage of
'raff' at a suburban fair, a body of Volunteers, Rotten Row in the season, or an Exeter Hall May
meeting. Some ingenious statistician has calculated that one in every forty adults in London is
a professional thief; that is to say, a gentleman who adopts, almost publicly, the profession of
burglar, pickpocket, or area sneak; who lives by dishonesty alone, and who, were dishonest
courses to fail him, would have no means whatever of gaining a livelyhood. But of the really
disreputable people in London, I suppose that acknowledged thieves do not form one twentieth
portion. Think of the number of men now living and doing well, as respectable members of
society, who are destined either to be hanged for murder or to be reprieved, according to the
form which the humanitarianism of the Home Sectretary for the time being may take. Murderers
are not recruited, as a rule, from the criminal classes. It is true that now and then a man or
woman is murdered for his or her wealth by a professed thief, but it is the exception, and not the
rule. Murder is often the crime of one who has never brought himself under the notice of the
police before. It is the crime of the young girl with a illegitimate baby; of the jealous husband,
lover, or wife; of a man exposed suddenly to a temptation which he cannot resist—the
temptation of a good watch or well-filled purse, which, not being a professional thief, he does
not know how to get at by any means short of murder. Well, all the scoundrels who are going to
commit these crimes, and to be hung or reprieved for them accordingly, are now walking among
us, and in every big crowd there must be at least one or two of them. Then the forgers; they are
not ordinarily professional thieves; they are usually people holding situations of greater or less
responsibility, from bank managers down to office boys; well, all these forgers who are to be
tried at all the sessions and assizes for the next twenty years, are walking about among us as
freely as you or I. Then the embezzlers—these are always people who stand well with their
employers and their friends. I remember hearing a judge say, in the course of the trial of a
savings-bank clerk for embezzlement, when the prisoner's counsel offered to call witnesses to
character of the highest respectability, that he attached little or no value to the witnesses called to
speak to their knowledge of the prisoner's character in an embezzlement case, as a man must
necessarily be of good repute among his fellows before he could be placed in a position in which
embezzlement was possible to him. Then the committers of assaults of all kinds. These are
seldom drawn from the purely criminal classes, though, of course, there are cases in which
professional thieves resort to violence when they cannot obtain their booty by other means. All
these people—all the murderers, forgers, embezzlers, and assaulters, who are to be tried for
their crimes during the next (say) twenty years, and moreover, all the murderers, forgers,
embezzlers, and assaulters whose crimes escape detection altogether (here is a vast field
for speculation open to the ingenious statisticians—of whom I am certainly one—who begin with
conclusions, and 'try back' to find premisses!)—all are elbowing us about in the streets of this
and other towns every day of our lives. How many of these go to make up a London crowd of,
say, thirty thousand people? Add to this unsavoury category all the fraudulent bankrupts, past
and to come, all the army of swindlers, all the betting thieves, all the unconscientious liars, all the
men who ill-treat their wives, all the wives who ill-treat their husbands, all the profligates of both
sexes, all the scoundrels of every shape and dye whose crimes do not come under the ken of
the British policeman, but who, for all that, are infinitely more harmful to the structure of London
society than the poor prig who gets six months for a 'wipe,' and then reflect upon the nature of
your associates whenever you venture into a crowd of any magnitude!

Struck by these considerations (I am not a deep thinker, as I hinted in a former page—if I
thought more deeply about them I might find reasons which would induce me to throw these
considerations to the winds), I beg that it will be understood that all the remarks that I may make
in favour of the people who form the subject of this chapter, are subject to many mental
reservations as to their probable infamy and possible detection.

Here is a gentleman who, as far as I know, is a thoroughly good fellow. He is a soldier, and a
sufficiently fortunate one, and stands well up among the captains and lieutenant-colonels of his
regiment of Guards. He has seen service in Crimea, as his three undress medals testify. He is,
I suppose, on his way to the orderly-room at the Horse Guards, for, at this morte saison, his
seniors are away, and he is in command. Unlike most Guardsmen, he knows his work
thoroughly, for he was the adjutant of his battalion for the six or seven years of his captaincy.
He is a strict soldier; rather feared by his subalterns when he is in command, but very much
liked notwithstanding. He has married a wealthy wife, has a good house in Berkeley Square,
and a place in Inverness-shire, with grouse-moors, deer-forests, and salmon-streams of the
right sort. He is thinking of standing for the county, at his wife's suggestion, but beyond a genial
interest in conservative successes, he does not trouble himself much about politics. Everybody
likes him, but he may—I say, he may—be an awful scoundrel at bottom.

Here are two young gentlemen (on your right), who appear to be annoying a quiet-looking and
rather plain young milliner [one who designs, makes, trims, or sells women's hats]. I am sorry to
say that this is a group which presents itself much too often to the Thumbnail Sketcher. I do not
mean to say that the two young men are always disgraceful bullies of unprotected young women,
or that the unprotected young women are always the timid, shrinking girls that they are
commonly represented to be in dramas of domestic interest, and in indignant letters to the
"Times" newspaper. I am afraid that it only too often happens that the shrinking milliner is quite
as glad of the society of the young men who accost her as the young men are of hers, although
I am bound to admit that in the present case the girl seems a decent girl, and her annoyers two
"jolly dogs," of the most objectionable type. One of them is so obliging as to offer her his arm,
while the other condescends to the extent of offering to carry her bandbox, an employment with
which he is probably not altogether unfamiliar in the ordinary routine of his avocations. She will
bear with them for a few minutes, in the hope that her continued silence will induce them to cease
their annoyance, and when she finds that their admiration is rather increased than abated by her
modest demeanour, she will stop still and request them to go on without her. As this is quite out
of the question, she will cross the road and they will follow her. At length their behavior will
perhaps be noticed by a plucky but injudicious passer-by, who will twist one of them on to his
back by the collar, and be knocked down himself by the other. Upon this a fight will ensue, the
young milliner will escape, and the whole thing will end unromantically enough in the station-house.

Here is an unfortunate soldier, a fit and proper contrast to the comfortable and contented
Guardsman (page 13). He is one of the Indian army of martyrs, who has given up all hope of
anything like promotion, and, after a life of battles, has subsided into that refuge for destitute
officers, a volunteer adjutancy. He is a thoroughly disappointed man, but he is much too well
bred to trouble you with his disappointments, unless you pump him on the subject, and then you
will find that the amalgamation of the British and Indian forces has resulted in complications that
you cannot understand, and that one of these complications is at the bottom of his retirement
from active service. He has strong views upon, and a certain interest in, the Banda and Kirwee
prize money, and he looks forward to buying an annuity for his mother (who lets lodgings) with
his share, if he should get it. He is poor—that is to say, his income is small; but he always
manages to dress well, and looks gentlemanly from a gentleman's—although, perhaps, not
from a tailor's—point of view.

This rather heavy and very melancholy-looking gentleman with the thick black beard is a
purveyor of touch-and-go farces to the principal metropolitan theatres. He also does amusing
gossip for the provincial journals, light frothy magazine articles, dramatic criticisms for a weekly
paper, and an occasional novel of an airy, not to say extremely trivial nature. His name is well
known to the readers of light literature, and also to enthusiastic play-goers who go early and
come away late. He is supposed by them to pass a butterfly existence, flitting gaily from
screaming farce to rollicking "comic copy," and back again from rollicking comic copy to
screaming farce. But this is not exactly true of his professional existence. He is a moody buffoon
in private life, much addicted to the smoking of long clay pipes and the contemplation of bad
boots. He is, at bottom, a good-natured fellow, and a sufficiently industrious one. He is much
chaffed for his moody nature now, but he will die some day, and then many solemn bumpers
will be emptied by his club fellows to the memory of the good heart that underlaid that thin
veneer of cynicism.

Here is a sketch from the window at White's. He is also a member of the Senior and the Carlton,
but he is seldom seen at either. He prefers the view from White's, and he prefers the men he
meets there, and he likes the chattiness of that famous club. He knows everybody, does the old
major, and has, in his time, been everywhere. He has served in a dozen different capacities, and
in almost as many services; indeed, his range of military experience extends from a captaincy of
Bashi Bazouks to a majority of Yeomanry Cavalry. He has been rather a sad dog in his time, but
he is much quieter now, and is extremely popular among dowagers at fashionable
watering-places [seaside health-resorts].

This young gentleman is a Foreign Office clerk, and he is just now on his way to discharge his
arduous duties in that official paradise. He is a rather weak-headed young gentleman, of very
good family and very poor fortune, and in course of time he will churn up into a very sound,
serviceable ambassador. At present he does not "go out" with the Government, though that
distinction may be in reserve for him if he perseveres in his present judicious course of
gentlemanly sleepiness. He is, in common with most of his Foreign Office fraternity, a great deal
too well dressed. It is really astonishing that young men of birth and breeding, as most of these
Foreign Office clerks are, should be so blind to the fact that there is nothing in this world so
utterly offensive to men of cultivated taste as a suit of brand new clothes. His views, at present,
are limited to his office, the "Times," his club, and any shootings and fishings that may be
offered to him by friendly proprietors.