victuals but to eat them, with the garden but to see it grow, with the
tax-gatherer but to hear him knock, with the maid but to hear her
scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are things unknown to us, save as
spectators of the pageant. We are fed we know not how,--quietists,
confiding ravens. We have the _otium pro dignitate_, a respectable
insignificance. Yet in the self condemned obliviousness, in the
stagnation, some molesting yearnings of life not quite killed rise,
prompting me that there was a London, and that I was of that old
Jerusalem. In dreams I am in Fleet Market; but I wake and cry to sleep
again. I die hard, a stubborn Eloisa in this detestable Paraclete. What
have I gained by health? Intolerable dulness. What by early hours and
moderate meals? A total blank. Oh, never let the 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