Now come Hilsea Barracks, with Hilsea Post Office opposite, and further on, opposite the "Green Posts" Inn, an obelisk, marking the eighteenth-century bounds of the borough of Portsmouth, with the inscription, "Burgi de Portesmuth Limes MDCCXCIX. Rev. G. Cuthbert praetore." And so by stages through North End into Landport, past ever-growing settlements and suburban wildernesses where new-built rows of hutches miscalled villas look out upon market-gardens and those forlornest of fields already marked out for "building sites," but still innocent of houses; where builders' refuse cumbers the ground, and where muddy pools, islanded with piles of broken and slack-baked bricks, and wrinkled into furious wavelets by the blusterous winds, resemble miniature seas in which (to aid the resemblance) lie the discarded iron pots and kettles of Portsmouth households, their spouts and handles rising above the waters like the vestiges of so many wrecked ironclads.
Successive eras of suburb-rearing are most readily to be noted. First come the red-bricked suburbs still in the making; then those of the '60's and the '70's, brown-bricked and grey-stuccoed; and then the settlements of a period ranging from 1840 to 1860, contrived in a fashion fondly supposed to represent Italian villas, characteristically constructed of lath and plaster now very much the worse for wear, but at one time wearing a spick-and-span appearance that would have delighted Macaulay, to whom the sight of a row of "semi-detached suburban residences" gave visions of progress and prosperity that seem to us inexpressibly vulgar. The sight of wealthy tradesfolk and of plutocratic contractors seems to have warmed Macaulay into an enthusiasm which became eloquent in enlarging upon the rows of villas that encircle every great town. To him the ostentatious surroundings of the despicable rogues--the typical contractors of the early and mid-Victorian epoch--who contracted to supply hay and fodder for our armies in the Crimea, and forwarded in their consignments a large proportion of bricks and rotten straw--the vulgar display of men of this stamp recalled the most prosperous times of the ancient Romans, and was therefore to be approved. But these men have long since left their lath-and-plaster fripperies for a place where (let us hope) their bricks and their rotten straw will be remembered against them, and their descendants have mounted on the heaps of their inherited money to a very high social scale indeed. The eligible residences themselves, with their "grounds," are mostly to be let, and the firesides across which unctuous purveyors and middlemen and their wives grinned at one another and ate buttered toast at tea-time, and drank "sherry wine" at night, are cold.