Landport left behind, one came, until within only a comparatively few years ago, upon Portsmouth town through a series of ditches, scarps, counterscarps, bastions, and defensible gates. They are all swept away now, as being obsolete, and where they stood are parks and barracks, military hospitals, and open spaces devoted to drilling. The surroundings of Portsmouth are, in fact, very modern, and probably the most ancient edifice here is the High Level railway station: a class of building which age has no power to render venerable. The latest effort of modernity is to be seen from this point in the Town Hall, of which every inhabitant of the allied towns of Portsmouth, Southsea, Gosport, and Landport is inordinately proud. And if size should count for anything, they have cause for pride in this municipal effort; for Portsmouth Town Hall is particularly immense. This is no place in which to enlarge upon its elephantine dimensions, nor to specify how many hundreds of feet its tower rises above the pavement; but it may be noted that it is a second-hand design, having been closely copied from the Town Hall of Bolton, in Lancashire. The architectural purist is at a loss how to describe its architecture; for it is neither good Classic nor passable Renaissance, although it partakes of the nature of both: it is, in view of the number of municipal buildings put up in this fashion over the country during the last forty years or so, perhaps best described as belonging to the Victorian Town Hall order of architectural design; and that seems to me a perspicuous definition of it. It has, however, an advantage that Bolton altogether lacks. The sooty atmosphere of that dingy manufacturing town has clothed the surface of its Town Hall with a mantle of grime, until the building, from topmost pinnacle to pavement level, is, to use a colloquialism, “as black as your hat.” The fresh breezes that blow over Portsmouth at least spare its Town Hall this indignity, and the design, such as it is, seems as fresh to-day as when the building was first inaugurated.In Leland’s time Portsmouth was “mured from the est toure a forelonge’s lengthe, with a mudde waulle armid with tymbre, whereon be great pieces both of yron and brassen ordinauns”; and in later ages these primitive defences had expanded into great bastions and massive walls, in which were no less than six gates. When the military authorities dismantled these town walls, with the gates and the fortifications, they did away at once with a great deal of inconvenience and annoyance experienced by the civil population of Portsmouth in being cooped up within bounds at night, and by their reforming zeal destroyed the greater part of the interest with which strangers viewed this old stronghold.

To-day one obtains too little historic colour in the streets of the old town. The “Blue Posts,” where the midshipmen stayed and joked and quarrelled, was burned down in 1870, and the “Fountain” is now a Home for Sailors, conducted upon strictly non-alcoholic lines, and Broad Street, which was at one time so very, very lively a place, has declined from the riotous days of yore into a more or less sedate old age. The inns with which it abounded are still there, but how altered their custom, their use and wont, from the hard-drinking, hard-swearing, hard-fighting days of old!

One may look back upon those old days with regret for a vanished picturesqueness and yet not wish them back; may know that the sailor who drinks cocoa and banks his wages in the Post-office Savings Bank is better off and immeasurably happier than his ancestor who, if he survived to receive any pay at all, squandered it instantly upon all conceivable kinds of drink and debauchery, and yet can see that his was by far the most interesting figure. It is the same with the ships of the navy. No one will contend that life was healthier upon the old wooden line-of-battle ships than it is on the modern ironclads of the fleet; not a single voice could be raised in favour of the dim and dirty orlop-decks of the old men-o’-war, in comparison with the light, airy, and roomy quarters on board our battle-ships of to-day; and yet there is scarce an Englishman who does not heartily regret the old three-deckers that rode the waves so gallantly, whose tier over tier of guns rose high above the waves and made a braver show than ever the “iron pots” of modern times can do.

The old-time aspect of Portsmouth is gone for ever. An almost complete transformation has taken place in appearance, in thought, and manner in little over a century, and where the body of Jack the Painter hung, high as Haman, from a lofty gallows on Blockhouse Beach, no criminals swing to-day. Even the “cat,” that instrument of discipline, too barbarous to be honoured even by immemorial usage, no longer flays the backs of A.B.’s, and is relegated to the cold shades of a museum, to rest beside such long-out-of-date instruments of torture as the branks and the thumb-screws.

But, tide what will betide, a fine martial-naval air clings about the old town, and will last while a bugle remains to be blown or a pennant is left to be hoisted. The salt sea-breezes still bluster through the narrow streets; the dockyard clangs louder, longer, busier than ever; the tramp of soldiers echoes; the boom of cannon peals across the waters, and God’s Englishmen are ready as ever they have been, and ever will be; though out yonder at Spithead and in foreign waters their forebears have strewed the floor of the sea with their bones, and though, with treacherous iron and steel beneath their feet while afloat, they may at any moment, be it peace or war, be sent to the bottom to join the ill-fated ships’ companies of the “Mary Rose,” the “Royal George,” the more recent “Captain,” “Eurydice,” “Atalanta,” or “Victoria.”

Here, where the stone stairs lead down into the water, is Portsmouth Point. Mark it well, for from this spot have embarked countless fine fellows to serve King and country afloat. What would we not give for a moment’s glimpse of “Point” (as Portsmouth folk call it, with a brevity born of every-day use) just a hundred years ago? Fortunately the genius of Rowlandson has preserved for us something of the appearance of Portsmouth Point at that time, when war raged over nearly all the civilized world, when wooden ships rode the waves buoyantly, when battles were the rule and peace the exception.

The Point was in those days simply a collection of taverns giving upon the harbour and the stairs, whence departed a continuous stream of officers and men of the navy. It was a place throbbing with life and excitement—the sailors going out and returning home; the leave-takings, the greetings; the boozing and the fighting, are all shown in Rowlandson’s drawing as on a stage, while the tall ships form an appropriate background, like the back-cloth of a theatrical scene. It is a scene full of humour. Sailors are leaning on their arms out of window; a gold-laced officer bids good-bye to his girl while his trunks are being carried down to the stairs; a drunken sailor and his equally drunken woman are belabouring one another with all the good-will in the world, and a wooden-legged sailor-man is scraping away for very life on a fiddle and dancing grotesquely to get a living. He is a funny figure, you say; but, by your leave, it seems to me that he is only a figure of a very great pathos. Belisarius, over whom historians have wept as they recounted his fall and his piteous appeals for the scanty charity of an obolus, was but a rascally Roman general who betrayed his trust and became a peculator of the first magnitude; and he deserved his fate. But here is a poor devil who has been maimed in battle and left to earn his bread by playing the fool before a crowd of careless folk, happy if he can excite their compassion to the extent of a stray sixpence or an occasional drink. No: his is not a funny figure.

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