Here, while the national prosperity feasts,
like another Belshazzar, on the spectacle of its own magnificence, is
the Writing on the Wall, which warns the monarch, Money, that his glory
is weighed in the balance, and his power found wanting.
Situated in such a neighborhood as this, Vauxhall Walk gains by
comparison, and establishes claims to respectability which no impartial
observation can fail to recognize. A large proportion of the Walk is
still composed of private houses. In the scattered situations where
shops appear, those shops are not besieged by the crowds of more
populous thoroughfares. Commerce is not turbulent, nor is the public
consumer besieged by loud invitations to "buy." Bird-fanciers have
sought the congenial tranquillity of the scene; and pigeons coo,
and canaries twitter, in Vauxhall Walk. Second-hand carts and cabs,
bedsteads of a certain age, detached carriage-wheels for those who
may want one to make up a set, are all to be found here in the same
repository. One tributary stream, in the great flood of gas which
illuminates London, tracks its parent source to Works established in
this locality. Here the followers of John Wesley have set up a temple,
built before the period of Methodist conversion to the principles of
architectural religion.
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