3-034-741 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Chill October" - Rotten-Row, 1871. '...the desolate view near Hyde Park-corner [in London]. The British workman sits in cheerless solitude on a chair he will not be asked to pay for: he puts down the bag of tools, with which he is slowly proceeding to a mid-day job at Bayswater; he smokes the pipe of political meditation, and thinks it very doubtful whether any of the Peers will presently come and sit beside him to discuss the...new Social Charter. As for the British policeman, another of our national institutions, he is at the post of duty, which he is likely to maintain as valiantly as the bravest Life Guardsman; and his discreet counsels to the pretty nursemaid will not interrupt the baby's maternal complacency with her doll in the perambulator, or the other little girl's frolic with her hoop and her doggy among the dry leaves rustling in the wind over the path. A contemplative sweeper, in the remote distance, reflects on the lapse of months and years; he could moralise, perhaps, on the fall of the leaf as wisely as Shakspeare or Homer, comparing it with the decline of human generations. But the leaves will be fresh and green next June'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.