  It has very justly been remarked that Brighton is treeless, but that complaint by no means holds good respecting the approach to it through Withdean and Preston Park, which is exceptionally well wooded, the tall elms forming an archway infinitely more lovable than the gigantic brick arch of the railway viaduct that poses as a triumphal entry into the town. It is Brighton’s ever-open front door. No occasion to knock or ring; enter and welcome to that cheery town: a brighter, cleaner London. Brighton has renewed its youth. It has had ill fortune as well as good, and went through a middle PRESTON VIADUCT: ENTRANCE TO BRIGHTON. The Pavilion is of course the very hub of Brighton. The pilgrim from London comes to it past the great church of St. Peter, built in 1824, in a curious Gothic, and thence past the Level to the Old Steyne. The names of the terraces and rows of houses on either side proclaim their period, even if those characteristic The Old Steyne was in Florizel’s time the rendezvous of fashion. The “front” and the lawns of Hove have long since usurped that distinction, but the gardens and the old trees of the Old Steyne are more beautiful than ever. They are the only few the town itself can boast. BRIGHTON Treeless Brighton has been the derision alike of Doctor Johnson and Tom Hood, to name no others. Johnson, who first visited Brighton in 1770 in the company of the Thrales and Fanny Burney, declared the neighbourhood to be so desolate that “if one had a mind to hang one’s self for desperation at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten a rope.” At any rate it would have needed a particularly stout tree to serve Johnson’s turn, had he a mind to it. Johnson was an ingrate, and not worthy of the good that Doctor Brighton wrought upon him. Hood, on the other hand, is jocular in an airier and lighter-hearted fashion. His punning humour (a kind of witticism which Johnson hated with the hatred of a man who delved deep after Greek and Latin roots) is to Johnson’s as the footfall of a cat to the earth-shaking tread of the elephant. His, too, is a manner of gibe that is susceptible of being construed into praise by the townsfolk. “Of all the trees,” says he, “I ever saw, none could be mentioned in the same breath with the magnificent beach at Brighton.” But though these trees of the Pavilion give a grateful shelter from the glare of the sun and the roughness of the wind, they hide little of the tawdriness of that architectural enormity. The gilding has faded, the tinsel become tarnished, and the whole pile of cupolas and minarets is reduced to one even tint, that is not white nor grey, nor any distinctive shade of any colour. How the preposterous building could ever That reptile Croker, the creature of that Lord Hertford whom one recognises as the “Marquis of Steyne” in “Vanity Fair,” admired it, as assuredly did not rough and ready Cobbett, who opines, “A good idea of the building may be formed by placing the pointed half of a large turnip upon the middle of a board, with four smaller ones at the corners.” That is no bad description of this monument of extravagance and bad taste. Begun so early as 1784, it was, after many alterations, pullings-down and rebuildings, completed in 1818, with the exception of the north gate, the work of William the Fourth in 1832. The Pavilion was, in fact, the product of an ill-informed enthusiasm for Chinese architecture, mingled with that of India and Constantinople, and was built as a Marine Palace, to combine the glories of the Summer Palace at Pekin with those of the Alhambra. It suffers nowadays, much more than it need do, from the utter absence of exterior colouring. A judicious scheme of brilliant colour and gilding, in accordance with its style, would not only relieve the dull drab monotone, but would go some way to justify the Prince’s taste. But, be it what it may, the Pavilion set the seal of a certain permanence upon the princely and royal favours extended to the town, whose population, numbered at 2,000 in 1761 and 3,600 in 1786, had grown to 5,669 by 1794 and 12,012 in 1811. In the succeeding ten years it had more than doubled itself, being returned in 1821 at 24,429. How Georgian Brighton is wholly swallowed up and engulfed in the modern towns of Brighton, Hove, and Preston is seen in the present population of 161,000—the equivalent of nearly six other Brightons of the size of that in the last year of the reign of George the Fourth. THE PAVILION. “And now I have one more story of the bacchanalian sort, in which Clarence and York and the very highest personage in the realm, the great Prince Regent, all play parts. “The feast was described to me by a gentleman who was present at the scene. In Gilray’s caricatures, and amongst Fox’s jolly associates, there figures a great nobleman, the Duke of Norfolk, called Jockey of Norfolk in his time, and celebrated for his table exploits. He had quarrelled with the Prince, like the rest of the Whigs; but a sort of reconciliation had taken place, and now, being a very old man, the Prince invited him to dine and sleep at the Pavilion, and the old Duke drove over from his Castle of Arundel with his famous equipage of grey horses, still remembered in Sussex. “The Prince of Wales had concocted with his royal brothers a notable scheme for making the old man drunk. Every person at table was enjoined to drink wine with the Duke—a challenge which the old toper did not refuse. He soon began to see that there was a conspiracy against him; he drank glass for glass: he overthrew many of the brave. At last the first gentleman of Europe proposed bumpers of brandy. One of the royal brothers filled a great glass for the Duke. He stood up and tossed off the drink. ‘Now,’ says he, ‘I will have my carriage and go home.’ “The Prince urged upon him his previous promise to sleep under the roof where he had been so generously entertained. ‘No,’ he said; ‘he had had enough of such hospitality. A trap had been set for him; he would leave the place at once, and never enter its doors more.’ “The carriage was called, and came; but, in the half-hour’s interval, the liquor had proved too potent for the old man; his host’s generous purpose was answered, and the Duke’s old grey head lay stupefied on the table. Nevertheless, when his post-chaise was “They drove him for half an hour round and round the Pavilion lawn; the poor old man fancied he was going home. “When he awoke that morning, he was in a bed at the Prince’s hideous house at Brighton. You may see the place now for sixpence; they have fiddlers there every day, and sometimes buffoons and mountebanks hire the Riding-House and do their tricks and tumbling there. The trees are still there, and the gravel walks round which the poor old sinner was trotted.” CHARLES, DUKE OF NORFOLK Very telling indignation, no doubt, but the gross defect of Thackeray’s “Four Georges” is its want of sincerity. Sympathy is wasted on that Duke, who was one of the filthiest voluptuaries of his age, or of any other since that of Heliogabalus. Charles Howard, eleventh Duke of Norfolk, was not merely a bestial drunkard, like his father before him, capable of drinking all his contemporaries under the table; but was a swinish creature in every way. Gorging himself to repletion with food and drink, he would make himself purposely sick, in order to begin again. A contemporary account of him as a member of the Beefsteak Club described him as a man of huge unwieldy fatness, who, having gorged until he had eaten himself into incapacity for speaking or moving, would motion for a bell to be rung, when servants, entering with a litter, would carry him off to bed. It was well written of him: On Norfolk’s tomb inscribe this placard: This “very old,” “poor old man” of Thackeray’s misplaced sympathy did not, as a matter of fact, live to a very great age. He died in 1815, aged sixty-nine. Practical joking was elevated to the status of a fine art at Brighton by the Prince and his merry men. A characteristic story of him is that told of a drive to Brighton races, when he was accompanied in his great |
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