The maypole had gone: the village feast and the club-walk were going; ...

The maypole had gone: the village feast and the club-walk were going; but the zoo, the panorama, the free-library, the baths, and the excursion ticket were bringing hundreds of thousands within the reach of orderly and good-humored pleasure.

It is a curious observation of the early fifties that

the workmen were wearing the same clothes as

the gentlemen. Still more oddly, the French artist, Delacroix, noticed that the gentlemen were wearing the same clothes as the workmen.

One grey patch remained, growing drearier as the life ebbed out of the villages; but the brooding apprehension of thirty rears had lifted. The testing time had come in 1848. The last Chartist demonstration was a demonstration only; for the artillery men who lined the Thames from Waterloo Bridge to Millbank, the shopkeepers who patrolled the streets, the Government clerks who laid in muskets and barricaded the windows with official files,' and the coal whippers who marched from Wapping with a general idea of standing by the Duke and a particular intention of breaking every Irishman's head, it was a demonstration and a festival.

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