1828.] Up* and Downs of London. 489 



shut himself up in a cold and comfortless apartment, without one to 

 soothe or speak to him, without a feeling of very painful privation and 

 destitution. It is this rapidity of transition which forms the amari 

 aliquid, which may at any time, and which does at many times, bubble 

 up in the very centre of the fountain of London bliss, and turns the 

 whole eremhile scene of wealth, and enjoyment, and glee, and gladness 

 around into something more tormentingly desolate than the steppe of 

 Issem, or the sands of Nubia. 



That very isolation which forms the charm of London life to the 

 fortunate, is the barb in the javelin of woe which makes it to hang, tug- 

 ging and lacerating at the heart, with all its iron woe. When every 

 moment fills its cup, we can concentrate our whole powers and feelings 

 upon it. Experience calls not to us from the past ; and suspicion does 

 not growl from behind the undrawn curtain of the future. We are like 

 the bee upon the parterre : we sip the honey of one flower ; and then, 

 heedless any more of that, we hum away to another. Our enjoyments 

 are all detached and perfect in themselves ; and they never pall, because 

 they are not bound to us in a chain of succession which we cannot break. 

 Every man whom we meet upon an equality and of that the power of 

 paying is the only measure is our friend for the time, and whenever we 

 tire of him we turn to another. He feels this no desertion ; for, when- 

 ever it suits his purpose, he does the same by us : and thus we are 

 happy with the million, without the trouble or the thought of caring a 

 single straw for one of its members. 



When, however, the reverse comes and there are more points from 

 which it can come than in any other place we drop down to the very 

 hell of mental suffering ; while the million out of which we have dropt 

 rolls with its wonted motion over us, as heedless of us or our fate as the 

 Thames is of a pebble in the ooze of its bed. 



When one is alone in a desert, even though one should be suffering the 

 greatest privation, the case is not utterly desperate to the mind : there 

 is still hope hope that you shall escape, return again to the haunts and 

 the society of men, and turn even your present sufferings into a source of 

 pleasure, by making them excite the sympathy or command the admira- 

 tion of those to whom you recount your adventures. If you are destitute 

 among a few men, it is because they do not mind what you can do ; or, 

 if you be oppressed or swindled by the one villain of the hamlet, you 

 find some consolation in thinking that you would have been better if 

 there had been another man to advise you. If, in short, pain or sorrow 

 of any kind come through one part of the world, you always derive a 

 species of consolation from thinking that the balm is worth the other 

 part. This diminishes the pressure of our misery, in the first instance, 

 and wins us from it in the end. If that part of the world which w r e have 

 not tried, and in which we therefore hope there is relief for us, will not 

 come to us, we form the resolution of going in quest of it. This is of 

 itself a new occupation ; and if the mind be occupied with any thing, 

 of which it has not drained all the experience, it cannot be wholly and 

 utterly miserable. Hope was the only good in the fatal box of Pandora, 

 in which there were so many ills; but he who finds it will, be the ills 

 ever so many, feel that it is more than a match for them all. It was not 

 in the perif and hardship of his many battles that the Macedonian con- 

 queror felt mercy ; it was not when those lands which, in the madness of 

 his ambition, he had meted out for conquest, were yet separated from him 



M.M. New Series. VOL. V. No. 29. 3 R 



