to hear her
scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are things unknown to us save as
spectators of the pageant. We are fed we know not how, quietists,
confiding ravens. We have the otium pro dignitate, a respectable
insignificance. Yet in the self condemned obliviousness, in the
stagnation, some molesting yearnings of life, not quite kill'd, rise,
prompting me that there was a London, and that I was of that old
Jerusalem. In dreams I am in Fleetmarket, but I wake and cry to sleep
again. I die hard, a stubborn Eloisa in this detestable Paraclete. What
have I gained by health? intolerable dulness. What by early hours and
moderate meals?--a total blank. O never let the lying poets be believed,
who 'tice men from the chearful haunts of streets--or think they mean it
not of a country village. In the ruins of Palmyra I could gird myself up
to solitude, or muse to the snorings of the Seven Sleepers, but to have
a little teazing image of a town about one, country folks that do not
look like country folks, shops two yards square, half a dozen apples and
two penn'orth of overlookd gingerbread for the lofty fruiterers of
Oxford Street--and, for the immortal book and print stalls, a
circulating library that stands still, where the shew-picture is a last
year's Valentine, and whither the fame of the last ten Scotch novels has
not yet travel'd (marry, they just begin to be conscious of the Red
Gauntlet), to have a new plasterd flat church, and to be wishing that it
was but a Cathedral. The very blackguards here are degenerate. The
topping gentry, stock brokers. The passengers too many to ensure your
quiet, or let you go about whistling, or gaping--too few to be the fine
indifferent pageants of Fleet Street. Confining, room-keeping thickest
winter is yet more bearable here than the gaudy months. Among one's
books at one's fire by candle one is soothed into an oblivion that one
is not in the country, but with the light the green fields return, till
I gaze, and in a calenture can plunge myself into Saint Giles's. O let
no native Londoner imagine that health, and rest, and innocent
occupation, interchange of converse sweet and recreative study, can make
the country any thing better than altogether odious and detestable. A
garden was the primitive prison till man with promethean felicity and
boldness luckily sinn'd himself out of it. Thence followd Babylon,
Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, playhouses,
satires, epi