ars and garrets of squalid poverty, the busy haunts
of avarice, the waste of luxury, and the wantonness of wealth.

Straight before me, the metropolis, like a devouring monster,
exhibited its equivocal and meretricious beauties, its extensive
manufactories, its a_spir_ing churches and towers, and other
innumerable edifices. #Westminster Abbey# stood prominent, at once
reviving the recollection of its superstitious origin, and exciting
deep veneration as the depository of the relics of so much renown.
What topics for commentary, if they had not been recently exhausted in
the classical stanzas of a #Maurice#! St. #Paul's#, the monument of
Wren, was but just visible through the haze, though the man at the
Telegraph asserted, that he could sometimes tell the hour by its dial
without the aid of a telescope! How characteristic is this structure
become of the British metropolis, and how flat the mass of common
spires and smoky chimneys would now seem without it! The Monument,
recording the delusions of faction, and the Tower, with all its gloomy
associations, were visible in the reach of the river. Of Churches
there appeared a monotonous groupe; while the houses presented a dingy
and misshapen mass, as uninteresting at the distance of seven miles as
an ant-hill at the distance of seven feet. Indeed, any wretch capable
of setting his foot upon an ant-hill, and of destroying it, because it
made no palpable appeals to his sympathy, might at this distance, by
parity of feeling, let fall a mill-stone on this great city, and
extinguish in an instant the hopes and cares of its inhabitants. On
this spot then I behold an assemblage of the greatest wonders of man's
creation, at a focal distance, which reduces them to the measure of an
#ANT-HILL#; and still further off they would be diminished even to a
#POINT#! Such is the estimate of the eye, nor is it heightened by that
of the ear; for I was assured that during tranquil nights,
particularly by listening near the ground, the confused hum of the
vast British metropolis could here be compared only to the buz of a
#BEE-HIVE#, or the sound of a #CONCH#! What a lesson do these
considerations afford to the pride of man, whose egotism represents
him to himself as the most important object of the infinite creation;
for whose use, he asserts, all things were made, and to whom all
things are subservient! It is, however, natural that the nearest
object should fill the largest angle, whether viewe