as a lively omen of the future great good-will which I was
destined to bear toward the city, resembling in kind that solicitude
which every Chief Magistrate is supposed to feel for whatever
concerns her interests and well-being. Indeed I consider myself in
some sort a speculative Lord Mayor of London: for though
circumstances unhappily preclude me from the hope of ever arriving at
the dignity of a gold chain and Spital Sermon, yet thus much will I
say of myself in truth, that Whittington with his cat (just emblem of
vigilance and a furred gown) never went beyond me in affection which
I bear to the citizens.

I was born, as you have heard, in a crowd. This has begot in me an
entire affection for that way of life, amounting to an almost
insurmountable aversion from solitude and rural scenes. This aversion
was never interrupted or suspended, except for a few years in the
younger part of my life, during a period in which I had set my
affections upon a charming young woman. Every man, while the passion
is upon him, is for a time at least addicted to groves and meadows
and purling streams. During this short period of my existence, I
contracted just familiarity enough with rural objects to understand
tolerably well ever after the _poets_, when they declaim in such
passionate terms in favor of a country-life.

For my own part, now the fit is past, I have no hesitation in
declaring, that a mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit-door of
Drury Lane Theatre, just at the hour of six, gives me ten thousand
sincerer pleasures, than I could ever receive from all the flocks of
silly sheep that ever whitened the plains of Arcadia or Epsom Downs.

This passion for crowds is nowhere feasted so full as in London. The
man must have a rare _recipe_ for melancholy who can be dull in Fleet
Street. I am naturally inclined to hypochondria, but in London it
vanishes, like all other ills. Often, when I have felt a weariness or
distaste at home, have I rushed out into her crowded Strand, and fed
my humor, till tears have wetted my cheek for unutterable sympathies
with the multitudinous moving picture, which she never fails to
present at all hours, like the scenes of a shifting pantomime.

The very deformities of London, which give distaste to others, from
habit do not displease me. The endless succession of shops where
_Fancy miscalled Folly_ is supplied with perpetual gauds and toys,
excite in me no puritanical aversion. I gladly behold eve