it, ghastly, example. We have lately been busy embanking, in
the capital of the country, the river which, of all its waters, the
imagination of our ancestors had made most sacred, and the bounty of
nature most useful. Of all architectural features of the metropolis,
that embankment will be, in future, the most conspicuous; and in its
position and purpose it was the most capable of noble adornment.

For that adornment, nevertheless, the utmost which our modern poetical
imagination has been able to invent, is a row of gas-lamps. It has,
indeed, farther suggested itself to our minds as appropriate to
gas-lamps set beside a river, that the gas should come out of fishes'
tails; but we have not ingenuity enough to cast so much as a smelt or a
sprat for ourselves; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble,
which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops in every
capital in Europe for the last fifty years. We cast _that_ badly, and
give luster to the ill-cast fish with lacquer in imitation of bronze. On
the base of their pedestals, towards the road, we put, for
advertisement's sake, the initials of the casting firm; and, for farther
originality and Christianity's sake, the caduceus of Mercury: and to
adorn the front of the pedestals, towards the river, being now wholly at
our wits' end, we can think of nothing better than to borrow the
door-knocker which--again for the last fifty years--has disturbed and
decorated two or three millions of London street-doors; and magnifying
the marvelous device of it, a lion's head with a ring in its mouth,
(still borrowed from the Greek,) we complete the embankment with a row
of heads and rings, on a scale which enables them to produce, at the
distance at which only they can be seen, the exact effect of a row of
sentry-boxes.

84. Farther. In the very center of the City, and at the point where the
Embankment commands a view of Westminster Abbey on one side, and of St.
Paul's on the other,--that is to say, at precisely the most important
and stately moment of its whole course,--it has to pass under one of the
arches of Waterloo Bridge, which, in the sweep of its curve, is as
vast--it alone--as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in
proportions. But over the Rialto, though of late and debased Venetian
work, there still reigns some power of human imagination: on the two
flanks of it are carved the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation; on
the keystone, the descendi