Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441. Various
clinking, children crowing, fiddle scraping, and men smoking—at the rate of six or seven miles an hour, to Hampton Court or Epping Forest. It is impossible for a person who has never witnessed these excursions in the height of summer, to form an adequate notion of the merry and exciting nature of the relaxation they afford to a truly prodigious number of the hardworking classes. Returning from Kingston to London one fine Monday morning in June last, we met a train of these laughter-loaded vans, measuring a full mile in length, and which must have consisted of threescore or more vehicles, most of them provided with music of some sort, and adorned with flowers and green boughs. As they shot one at a time past the omnibus on which we sat, we were saluted by successive volleys of mingled mirth and music, and by such constellations of merry-faced mortals in St Monday garb, as would have made a sunshine under the blackest sky that ever gloomed. Arrived at Hampton Court, the separate parties encamp under the trees in Bushy Park, where they amuse themselves the livelong day in innocent sports, for which your Londoner has at bottom a most unequivocal and hearty relish. They will most likely spend a few hours in wandering through the picture-galleries in the palace, then take a stroll in the exquisite gardens, where the young fellow who is thoughtless enough to pluck a flower for his sweetheart, is instantly and infallibly condemned to drag a heavy iron roller up and down the gravel-walk, to the amusement of a thousand or two of grinning spectators. Having seen the palace and the gardens, they pay a short visit, perhaps, to the monster grape-vine, with its myriads of clusters of grapes, all of which Her Gracious Majesty is supposed to devour; and then they return to their dinner beneath some giant chestnut-tree in the park. The cloth is spread at the foot of the huge trunk; the gashed joints of the Sunday's baked meats, flanked by a very mountainous gooseberry pie, with crusty loaves and sections of cheese and pats of butter, cut a capital figure among the heterogeneous contribution of pitchers, preserve-jars, tin-cans, mugs and jugs, shankless rummers and wineglasses, and knives and forks of every size and pattern, from the balance handles and straight blades of to-day, to the wooden haft and curly-nosed cimeter of a century back. Their sharpened appetites make short work of the cold meats and pies. Treble X of somebody's own corking fizzes forth from brown jar and black bottle, and if more is wanted, it is fetched from the neighbouring tavern. Dinner done, the fiddle strikes up, and a dance on the greensward by the young people, while the old ones, stretched under the trees, enjoy a quiet gossip and a refreshing pipe, fills up the afternoon. There is always somebody at this crisis who is neither too old to dance nor too young to smoke a gossipping pipe, and so he does both at intervals—rushing now into the dance, drawn by the irresistible attraction of the fiddle, and now sidling back again to his smoke-puffing chums, impelled by the equally resistless charms of tobacco. Then and therefore he is branded as a deserter, and a file of young lasses lay hands on him, and drag him forth in custody to the dance; and after a good scolding from laughing lips, and a good drubbing from white handkerchiefs, they compromise the business at last by allowing him to dance with his pipe in his mouth.
By five o'clock, Mrs Grundy has managed, with the connivance of Jack the driver, somehow or other to boil the kettle, and a cup of tea is ready for all who are inclined to partake. The young folks for the most part prefer the dance: they can have tea any day—they will not dance on the grass again till next year perhaps; so they make the most of their time. By and by, the fiddler's elbow refuses to wag any longer: he is perfectly willing himself, as he says, 'to play till all's blue; but you see,' he adds, 'bones won't do it.' 'Never mind,' says the Beau Nash of the day: 'sack your badger, old boy, and go and get some resin. Now, then, for kiss in the ring!' Then while the fiddler gets his resin, which means anything he likes to eat or drink, the whole party, perhaps amounting to three or four van-loads in all, form into a circle for 'kiss in the ring.' The ring is one uproarious round of frolic and laughter, which would 'hold both its sides,' but that it is forced to hold its neighbours' hands with both its own, under which the flying damsel who has to be caught and kissed bobs in and out, doubling like a hare, till she is out of breath, and is overtaken at last, and led bashfully into the centre of the group, to suffer the awful penalty of the law. While this popular pastime is prolonged to the last moment, the van is getting ready to return; the old folks assist in stowing away the empty baskets and vessels; and an hour or so before sun-down, or it may be half an hour after, the whole party are remounted, and on their way home again, where they arrive, after a jovial ride, weary with enjoyment, and with matter to talk about for a month to come.
At Epping Forest, the scene is very different, but not a whit the less lively. There are no picture-galleries or pleasure-gardens, but there is the Forest to roam in, full of noble trees, in endless sinuous avenues, crowned with the 'scarce intruding sky,' among which the joyous holiday-makers form a finer picture than was ever painted yet. Then there are friendly foot-races and jumping-matches, and leap-frogging, and black-berrying, and foot-balling, and hockey-and-trapping, and many other games besides, in addition to the dancing and the ring-kissing. Epping and Hainault Forests are essentially the lungs of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Their leafy shades are invaded all the summer long by the van-borne hosts of laborious poverty. Clubs, whose members invest but a penny a week, start into existence as soon as the leaves begin to sprout in the spring; with the first gush of summer, the living tide begins to flow into the cool bosom of the forest; and until late in the autumn, unless the weather is prematurely wintry, there is no pause for a day or an hour of sunshine in the rush of health-seekers to the green shades. The fiat has gone forth from the government for the destruction of these forests, for the felling of the trees and the enclosure of the land. Will the public permit the execution of the barbarous decree? We trust not.
Notwithstanding all that has been said, and so justly said, of the notorious improvidence of the poor, it will be seen from the above hasty sketches, that they yet can and do help themselves to many things which are undeniably profitable and advantageous to them: they only want, in fact, a motive for so doing—a foregone conviction that the thing desiderated is worth having. Now, here is ground for hope—an opening, so to speak, for the point of the wedge. That the very poor may be taught to practise self-denial, in the prospect of a future benefit, these clubs have proved; and we may confess to a prejudice in their favour, not merely from what they have accomplished, but from a not unreasonable hope, that they may perchance foster a habit which will lead to far better things than even warm chimney-corners, greenwood holidays, roast geese, and plum-pudding.
ARAGO ON THE SUN
In the Annuaire of the Bureau des Longitudes, recently published in Paris, appears a paper by the distinguished astronomer Arago—'On the Observations which have made known the Physical Constitution of the Sun and of different Stars; and an Inquiry into the Conjectures of the Ancient Philosophers, and of the Positive Ideas of Modern Astronomers on the Place that the Sun ought to occupy among the Prodigious Number of Stars which stud the Firmament'—in which all that appertains to the subject is so ably condensed, as to afford material for a popular summary, which we purpose to convey in the present article. The eclipse of the sun of last July, by enabling observers to repeat former observations and test their accuracy, furnished some of the results which serve to complete the paper in question, and which may be considered as settled, owing to the improvements continually taking place in the construction of instruments. Although astronomy is the exactest of sciences, its problems are not yet all fully solved; and for the determination of some of these, observers have to wait for years—in certain instances, for a century or more, until all the circumstances combine for a favourable observation. From the days of the Epicurean philosopher, who, judging from appearances, declared the sun to be no more than a foot in diameter, to those of living calculators, who give to the orb a diameter of 883,000 miles, there has been a marvellous advance. In these dimensions, we have a sphere one million four hundred thousand times larger than the earth. 'Numbers so enormous,' says M. Arago, 'not being often employed in ordinary life, and giving us no very precise idea of the magnitudes which they imply, I recall here a remark that will convey a better understanding of the immensity of the solar volume. If we imagine the centre of the sun to coincide with that of the earth, its surface would not only reach the region in which the moon revolves, but would extend nearly as far again beyond.' By the transit of Venus in 1769, it was demonstrated that the sun is 95,000,000 miles from the earth; and yet, distant as it is, its physical constitution has been determined; and the history of the successive steps by which this proof has been arrived at, forms one of the most interesting chapters in the progress of science.
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