n of the kingdom. "No wonder," he writes, "that our
villages are depopulated and our farms in want of day labourers. The
villagers come up to London in the hopes of getting into service where
they can live luxuriously and wear fine clothes. Disappointed in this
respect, they become thieves and sharpers, and London being an immense
wilderness, in which there is neither watch nor ward of any
signification, nor any order or police, affords them lurking-places as
well as prey." The old Squire's complaint is to be heard every day when
we think or speak or write of the great metropolis.

The poor Squire writes bitterly of London life: "I start every hour from
my sleep at the horrid noise of the watchmen calling the hour through
every street, and thundering at every door." "If I would drink water I
must quaff the mawkish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all
manner of defilement, or swallow that which comes from the Thames,
impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster. Human
excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed
of all the drugs, minerals and poisons used in mechanics and
manufactures, enriched with the putrefying carcases of beasts and men,
and mixed with the scourings of all the washtubs, kennels, and common
sewers within the bills of mortality." The City churches and churchyards
were in my time constant sources of disease, and the chapels were, where
they had burying-grounds attached, equally bad. One need not remark in
this connection how much better off we are in our day. Again the Squire
writes: "The bread I eat is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk,
alum and bone ashes." Here, again, we note gladly a change for the
better. The vegetables taste of nothing but the dung-hills from whence
they spring. The meat the Squire holds to be villainously bad, "and as
for the pork, it is an abominable carnivorous animal fed with horseflesh
and distillers' grains, and the poultry is all rotten in consequence of
fever, occasioned by the infamous practice of sewing up the guts, that
they may be the sooner fattened in crops in consequence of this cruel
restriction." Then there is the butter, a tallowy, rancid mass,
manufactured with candle grease and butcher's stuff. Well, these
enormities are permitted no longer, and that is a step gained. We have
good water; the watchman is gone, and the policeman has taken his place;
but London as I knew it was little better tha