1829-3 A Ramble in London. 539 



helped you to bread, taking it for granted that no person In the garb of 

 a Christian would make his dinner without it, and therefore not wasting 

 words on the matter. In a few minutes he returns, bearing as many 

 plates as you have ordered viands, each covered, and containing a 

 measured quantity, calculated with such mathematical accuracy and 

 precision, that in an hundred plates there shall not be the difference of 

 a scruple — had Shy lock taken a lesson in cutting from one of these 

 gentry, it would have gone hard with poor Antonio — nothing but 

 Portia's ingenious caveat against shedding his blood, while cutting his 

 flesh, could have saved him — a London eating-house-keeper would have 

 taken off the exact pound, neither a grain more, or less, at a single 

 slice, with his eyes shut. Having despatched your dinner, drinking 

 malt if your depraved taste so inclines you, for wine is out of the question 

 there, Sir Oracle again appears, to propound to you cheese, and pastry, 

 of various kinds, Avhich having discussed, or rejected, you demand yoiu- 

 bill ; but as everything is transacted here, viva voce, in the same pithy 

 style in which he prophesied your dinner, does the all-sufficient waiter 

 predicate the cost, which, though he generously served you with twice 

 as much as you could by any possibility eat, amounts to about one shil- 

 ling, or if you are a man of expensive habits, and fond of a variety of 

 dishes, your epicurism costs you three pence more. 



No doubt you wish to taste the potations of the men of the city ? — 

 Go, then, to " The Shades," at London Bridge, and there, with Father 

 Thames, that water- drinking god, full in your view, luxuriate over 

 your half pint of good port or sherry, drawn from the wood, after the 

 old-world fashion ; and when you return to the distant v/est, from your 

 oriental journey, you may boast at Long's, or Stevens', that you dined, 

 and drank wine, in the El Dorado of Cockaigne, for half-a-crown. 



Londoners are never young, that is to say, morally or mentally young 

 — to be sure they vary in size and appearance, according to the number 

 of years which have rolled over their heads, but they have no infancy, 

 or boyhood, properly speaking. They form a permanent exception to 

 Locke's assertion, that there are no innate ideas ; they are all born with 

 an instinctive knowledge of compound fractions, and tare and trett, and 

 can balance accounts from the moment they are born : this is proved by 

 the extreme regularity with which they calculate the increase of food, 

 and proportion it to the increase of size, and strength, invariably 

 requiring at the hands of their attendants, from day to day, the exact 

 addition necessary, together with a suitable allowance for waste. IMany 

 accurate observers of city phenomena, incline, from a close consideration 

 of the foregoing circumstances, to believe in the transmigration of souls, 

 and maintain that a London alderman never dies, but that when his 

 frame is worn out by a long and close application to business, including, 

 of course, a regular attendance at corporation festivals, where, in obe- 

 dience to the canons of the city, it is incumbent on him to consume a 

 certain quantity of turtle and venison, duly and sufficiently moistened 

 with wine ; when his frtime, I say, like an over-wrought mill, yields to 

 the force of attrition, and can no longer overcome the vis inertia' of food, 

 they affirm that his soul, like that of the Grand Lama, seeks a new 

 habitation ; and as the priests of that pontiff are enabled to discover their 

 future sovereign by certain infallible tokens, so, it is believed, are the 

 skilful in such matters, able to detect the aldermanic spirit, while lurking 

 in its infantile disguise, chiefly, it is said, by a certain orbicular protu- 



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