Of old—that is to say, twenty years ago—the great majority of the English people suffered from a mental and general disability which was termed "provincialism." If you hailed from Manchester, or Liverpool, or Birmingham, or Edinburgh, or Glasgow, the kind gentlemen in London who size people up and put them in their places assured you that you were a provincial, and that you would have to rub shoulders a great deal with the world—by which they meant London—before you could rightly consider yourself qualified to exist. Against the epithet "provincial," however, not a few persons rebelled, when it was applied flatly to themselves. Most men of feeling felt hurt when you called[Pg 125] them provincial. In the world of letters and journalism to call a man provincial was the last and unkindest cut of all, and it usually settled him, just as to say that he has no sense of humour settles him to-day. Then up rose Thomas Carlyle and Robert Buchanan and a few lesser lights, who said, "You call us provincials: provincials we undoubtedly are, and we glory in the character." This rather baffled, not to say amazed, the lily-fingered London assessors, and gradually the term "provincial," as a term of opprobrium, passed out of use.

It is admitted now on all hands that the provincial is a very useful kind of fellow; and when the metropolis feels itself running short of talent and energy, the provincial is invariably invited to look in. Latterly, however, the Londoner and the dweller in English provincial cities have begun to exhibit a distinctly modern disorder, which may be called, for want of a better term, "suburbanism." In London, which may be taken as the type of all English cities, suburbanism is[Pg 126] pretty well rampant. It has its origin in what the Americans would call "location." A man\'s daily work lies, say, in the City or in the central quarters of London. For various reasons—such, for example, as considerations of health, expenditure, and custom—it is practically impossible for him to live near his work. He must live somewhere; so he goes to Balham, or Tooting, or Clapham, or Brondesbury, or Highgate, or Willesden, or Finchley, or Crouch End, or Hampstead, or some other suburban retreat. London is ringed round with these residential quarters, these little towns outside the walls. A visitor to any one of them is at once struck with its striking and painful similarity to all the others. There is a railway station belonging to one of the metropolitan lines; there is a High Street, fronted with lofty and rather gaudy shops; there is a reasonable sprinkling of churches and chapels; there is a brand-new red-brick theatre; and the rest is row on row and row on row of villa residences, each with its dreary pali[Pg 127]sading and attenuated grass-plot in front, and its curious annex of kitchen, or scullery, behind. Miles and miles of these villas exist in every metropolitan suburb worth the name; and though the rents and sizes of them may vary, they are all built to one architectural formula, and all pinchbeck, ostentatious, and unlovely. No person of judgment, nobody possessed of a ray of the philosophic spirit, can gaze upon them without concluding at once that the English do not know how to live. Take a street of these villas, big or little, and what do you find? You note, first, that nearly every house, be it occupied by clerk, Jew financier, or professional man, has got a highfalutin name of its own. The County Council or local authority has already bestowed upon it a number. But this is not enough for your suburbanist, who must needs appropriate for his house a name which will look swagger on his letter-paper. Hence No. 2, Sandringham Road, Tooting, is not No. 2, Sandringham Road, Tooting, at all; but The Laurels, if[Pg 128] you please. No. 4—not to be outdone—is Holmwood; No. 6 is Hazledene; No. 8, The Pines; No. 10, Sutherland House; and so forth. Then, again, if you walk down a street and keep your eye on the front windows of this thoroughfare of mansions, you will note that every one of those windows has cheap lace curtains to it, and that immediately behind the centre of the window there is a little table, upon which loving hands have placed a green high-art vase, containing a plant of sorts. And right back in the dimness of the parlour there is a sideboard with a high mirrored back.

If you made acquaintance with half a dozen of the occupiers of these houses, and were invited into the half dozen front rooms, you would find in each, in addition to the sideboard before mentioned, a piano of questionable manufacture, a brass music-stool with a red velvet cushion, an over-mantel with mirrored panels, a "saddle-bag suite," consisting of lady\'s and gent\'s and six ordinary chairs and a couch; a centre-[Pg 129]table with a velvet-pile cloth upon it, a bamboo bookcase containing a Corelli and a Hall Caine or so, together with some sixpenny Dickenses picked up at drapers\' bargain-sales, Nuttall\'s Dictionary, Mrs. Beeton\'s House Book, a Bible, a Prayer Book, some hymn-books, a work-basketful of socks waiting to be darned, and a little pile of music, chiefly pirated. At night, when Spriggs comes home to The Laurels, he has an apology for late dinner, gets into his slippers, and retires with Mrs. Spriggs, and perhaps his elder daughter, into that parlour. There he reads a halfpenny newspaper till there is nothing left in it to read; then he talks to Mrs. Spriggs about that beast So-and-so, his employer; and Mrs. Spriggs tells him not to grumble so much, and asks the elder daughter why she doesn\'t play a chune to \'liven us up a bit. "Yes," says Spriggs, "what is the good of having a piano, and me buying you music every Saturday, if you never play?" Whereupon the elder daughter rattles through Dolly Gray, The Honeysuckle and the Bee, and[Pg 130] Everybody\'s Loved by Some One; and Spriggs beats time with his foot till he grows weary, and thinks we had better have supper and get off to bed.

This kind of thing is going on right down both sides of Sandringham Road—at Holmwood, at Hazledene, at The Pines, and at Sutherland House, as well as at The Laurels—every week-day evening between the hours of eight and midnight. In point of fact, it is going on all over Tooting. It is the suburban notion of an \'appy evening at home; and, hallowed as it is by wont and custom, everybody in Tooting takes it to be the best that life can offer after business hours. Perhaps it is. Just before ............