he lying poets be believed
who 'tice men from the cheerful haunts of streets, or think they mean it
not of a country village. In the ruins of Palmyra I could gird myself up
to solitude, or muse to the snorings of the Seven Sleepers; but to have
a little teasing image of a town about one, country folks that do not
look like country folks, shops two yards square, half-a-dozen apples and
two penn'orth of over-looked gingerbread for the lofty fruiterers of
Oxford Street, and for the immortal book and print stalls a circulating
library that stands still, where the show-picture is a last year's
Valentine, and whither the fame of the last ten Scotch novels has not
yet travelled (marry, they just begin to be conscious of the
"Redgauntlet"), to have a new plastered flat church, and to be wishing
that it was but a cathedral! The very blackguards here are degenerate,
the topping gentry stockbrokers; the passengers too many to insure your
quiet, or let you go about whistling or gaping,--too few to be the fine
indifferent pageants of Fleet Street. Confining, room-keeping, thickest
winter is yet more bearable here than the gaudy months. Among one's
books at one's fire by candle, one is soothed into an oblivion that one
is not in the country; but with the light the green fields return, till
I gaze, and in a calenture can plunge myself into St. Giles's. Oh, let
no native Londoner imagine that health and rest and innocent occupation,
interchange of converse sweet and recreative study, can make the country
anything better than altogether odious and detestable. A garden was the
primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness luckily
sinned himself out of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice,
London; haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, playhouses, satires,
epigrams, puns,--these all came in on the town part and the thither side
of innocence. Man found out inventions. From my den I return you
condolence for your decaying sight,--not for anything there is to see in
the country, but for the miss of the pleasure of reading a London
newspaper. The poets are as well to listen to; anything high may--nay,
must be read out; you read it to yourself with an imaginary auditor: but
the light paragraphs must be glid over by the proper eye; mouthing
mumbles their gossamery substance. 'Tis these trifles I should mourn in
fading sight. A newspaper is the single gleam of comfort I receive here;
it comes from rich Cathay with tidings of