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Updated: September 14, 2025
"What can you expect, my dear fellow? it is not Racine's or Moliere's, but La Feuillade's; and a great lord cannot rhyme like a beggarly poet." "It is very unfortunate, though, that you only remember the termination." "Stay, stay, I have just recollected the beginning of the second couplet." "Why, there's the birdcage, with a pretty pair, The charming Montalais, and..."
Those who know it call it The Birdcage it is so full of whisperings and whistlings and chirrupings. The room, with its dirty cushions and half-smoked hookahs, smelt abominably of stale tobacco. In one corner lay a huge and shapeless woman clad in greenish gauzes, and decked, brow, nose, ear, neck, wrist, arm, waist, and ankle with heavy native jewellery.
I made my way into the Birdcage walk, and so through Palace-yard down to the stairs at the foot of where they were driving the first piles of that great structure which is now called Westminster Bridge. Here a Waterman agreed to take me to the Tower stairs for a shilling, which was not above thrice his legal fare, but yokels and simpletons are common prey in this great village of London.
"I feel like an elephant in a birdcage," he replied. "Are you comfortable, little Gray Goose?" "Yes. But you, Jeems? You are wet!" "But so happy that I don't feel it, Gray Goose." He could make her out only dimly there in the darkness of the berth. Her face was a pale shadow, and she had loosened her damp hair so that the warmth and dry air might reach it more easily.
Even that salt of the earth, the elect of society, represented by that little great world which lies between the narrow circle bounded by Bryanstone Square on the north and by Birdcage Walk on the south, did not consider seven o'clock too early an hour for a dinner party which was to be followed by routs, drums, concerts, conversazione, as the case might be.
My own little bed was so superciliously looked upon by a Power unknown to me, hazily called "The Trade," that a brass coal-scuttle, a roasting-jack, and a birdcage, were obliged to be put into it to make a Lot of it, and then it went for a song. So I heard mentioned, and I wondered what song, and thought what a dismal song it must have been to sing!
The grass huts of Hawaii, the birdcage houses of Tahiti, or the open shed, with the crazy Venetian blinds, of the polite Samoan none of these can be compared with the Marquesan paepae-hae, or dwelling platform.
Even when there was an important debate on he would tear up Birdcage Walk in a hansom, and spend an hour in the Duchess's amber drawing-rooms, enlightening Lady Mabel as to the latest aspect of the Policy of Conciliation, or standing by the piano while she played Chopin.
"There they sit with ranks unbroken, cheering on the fierce debate, Till the sunrise lights them homeward as they tramp through Storey's Gate, Racked with headache, pale and haggard, worn by nights of endless talk, While the early sparrows twitter all along the Birdcage Walk."
"That is to say, you will wait until bed-time to order the mattrass," replied Aunt Roubert; "well, well, my children, as you will, but now your attendance is required on your linen, which awaits you in the lobby; I suppose my niece does not propose to arrange it in her birdcage, or flower-stand; can she show me the place destined for it?"
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