lord of a Lincolnshire
or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily
distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His
dress, his gait, his accent, the manner in which he gazed at the shops,
stumbled into the gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under the
waterspouts, marked him out as an excellent subject for the operations
of swindlers and barterers. Bullies jostled him into the kennel. Hackney
coachmen splashed him from head to foot. Thieves explored with perfect
security the huge pockets of his horseman's coat, while he stood
entranced by the splendour of the Lord Mayor's show. Moneydroppers, sore
from the cart's tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared to him
the most honest friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen. Painted women,
the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed themselves on
him for countesses and maids of honour. If he asked his way to Saint
James's, his informants sent him to Mile End. If he went into a shop, he
was instantly discerned to be a fit purchaser of everything that nobody
else would buy, of second-hand embroidery, copper rings, and watches
that would not go. If he rambled into any fashionable coffee house, he
became a mark for the insolent derision of fops and the grave waggery
of Templars. Enraged and mortified, he soon returned to his mansion,
and there, in the homage of his tenants and the conversation of his boon
companions, found consolation for the vexatious and humiliations which
he had undergone. There he was once more a great man, and saw nothing
above himself except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench
near the Judge, or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the Lord
Lieutenant.

The chief cause which made the fusion of the different elements of
society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty which our ancestors
found in passing from place to place. Of all inventions, the alphabet
and the printing press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge
distance have done most for the civilisation of our species. Every
improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and
intellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitates the
interchange of the various productions of nature and art, but tends to
remove national and provincial antipathies, and to bind together all
the branches of the great human family. In the seventeenth century the
inhabitants of London were, for almost every