1828.] Ups and Downs of London. 485 



the groves ! Psha! owls and hurdy-gurdies ! Stephens, and Caradori, 

 and Paton, and Vestris these are the nightingales for me ! Much meets 

 the ear, and more aye, far more is meant. And then the glorious roll 

 of the orchestra, to call you to life again, after you have died in rapture 

 at the songs ! 



" Cum tuba depresso graviter sub murmure mugit, 



Et reboant raucum, retrocita cornua bombum." 



Who that could engage these things would care a single straw for the 

 gabble of jays, or the chatter of chaffinches, or even the cold streams, 

 with all the hissing and hideousness of their swans and geese ? 



" Vallibus et cygni gelidis orti ex Heliconis 

 Cum liquidum tollunt lugubri voce querelam." 



" Lugubrious and querulous," indeed ! I had rather hear the death- 

 bell "gong! gong!" from morning till night, and from night till 

 morning. Then for the loves of the landward solitudes those sweet- 

 nesses of the soul which run so glibly from the tongue, and fall so 

 enchantingly on the ear of those who know nothing about the reality of 

 them why, what are they ? In as far as they concern the " aplerce 

 bipedes," as the learned would call them the two 7 footed things without 

 wings and truly they are without wings, either of feathers or of fancy 

 they are Hob bargaining for a clean shirt, and Dolly for the title of an 

 honest woman. Who that has a soul in him would care three straws, or 

 the half of one straw, for the billet-doux which the bee carries from the 

 male ash to the female ; the leers and loving looks of a couple of jacks, 

 or gudgeons, or red mullets ; or the sighs and soft sayings of a brace of 

 tender eels in the ooze of a stagnant puddle ? Put a hook in the jaws 

 of the rascals ; never mind how the thing with which you bait that hook 

 may wriggle it is but a worm, a grub, or a minnow, and has no busi- 

 ness to feel pain. Put a hook in the jaws of the rascals ; drag them out ; 

 bring them to London ; send them to school at Bleadon's, or to the pro- 

 fessor in the proper London University in St. James's Street, till they be 

 fit for appearing in genteel company ; and then they may be worth the 

 courting but not till then. 



As for the country generally, or any where, why, what is it ? An 

 honest Scotchman describes it all when he describes his own " unco* 

 gude to cumm oot oV It is nothing but thejruges which the town is 

 consumere natus. A beast is but a beast any where, and so is a vege- 

 table but a vegetable. But the clod the apterous biped is merely an 

 adjective to vegetables and beasts or rather he is a copulative conjunc- 

 tion, connecting, in one instance, the potatoes and turnips of this year 

 with those of the next ; and, in another instance, making 



" Former beeves shake hoofs with latter, 

 And those that were before, come after." 



He puts not a drop into the bowl of pleasure ; and if the rolls and bu tter 

 and rump-steaks, and Asparagus, would continue to come to town all the 

 same, excidunto the clod, and there is so much the more added to the 

 productive clay of the land. 



The loneliness, the life, the love, and all the fine things of the country, 

 exist only in the poet's eye, or the painter's brush : when they are in 

 the former, truly it is 



' ' * c< in a fine frenzy rolling 1 :" 



