I take the following from "Nicholas Niekleby," Chapter
II.
"Although a few members of the graver professions live about Golden
Square, it is not exactly in anybody's way to or from anywhere....
It is a great resort of foreigners. The dark complexioned men, who
wear large rings, and heavy watchguards, and bushy whiskers, and
who congregate under the opera colonnade, and about the box-office
in the season, between four and five in the afternoon, when they
give orders--all live in Golden Square, or within a street of it.
Two or three violins and a wind instrument from the opera band
reside within its precincts. Its boarding-houses are musical, and
the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening-time round the
head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of a little
wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the Square.... Street bands
are on their mettle in Golden Square; and itinerant glee-singers
quaver involuntarily as they raise their voices within its
boundaries....
"Some London houses have a melancholy little plot of ground behind
them, usually fenced in by four white-washed walls, and frowned
upon by stacks of chimneys, in which there withers on from year to
year a crippled tree, that makes a show of putting forth a few
leaves late in Autumn, when other trees shed theirs, and drooping
in the effort, lingers on all crackled and smoke-dried till the
following season, when it repeats the same process; and perhaps, if
the weather be particularly genial, even tempts some rheumatic
sparrow to chirp in its branches.
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