xx LONDON SIGHTS 267 



forward, and speaking with great cheerfulness and un- 

 concern to the noblemen with him. There were none of 

 those acclamations of joy that used to salute the king's 

 ear on his first ascent of the throne, before the machina- 

 tions of bad ministers had damped the people's affection 

 to the royal person." Another day the king and queen 

 passed in their chairs in the park : the latter looked pale 

 and inanimate, but " the benignity of her character 

 adorns her with a lustre superior to beauty." 



From the house of " Friend Post in Thames Street, 

 we had the opportunity of viewing that pompous trifle, the 

 Lord Mayor's Show." It went at the start by water on 

 the river, " the barges proceeding in very irregular order. 

 Its appearance was announced by music and the firing 

 of guns." Another trait in the Londoner of 1770 is not 

 lacking to-day. " There is no city in the world," writes 

 our young diarist, " whose inhabitants have so much 

 curiosity as those of London. A straw will attract the 

 attention of hundreds. If one person will stop to look 

 at anything, he will in a few minutes have a crowd behind 

 him to inspect his studies." 



London was already in those days a great city " this 

 vast place " the journal calls it yet the country was 

 then still near at hand. The fields and trees that bordered 

 the route westward to Hammersmith reminded the young 

 Lancastrian of her own beloved county. Bloomsbury 

 was a fashionable place ; the Duke of Bedford lived in 

 Bloomsbury Square, and the Spanish Ambassador in 

 Great Ormond Street, where the sumptuous mansion of 

 Dr. Mead was still standing. It may comfort the present 

 Londoner to learn that dense fogs occurred then as now : 

 on one day towards November we are told that " almost 

 total darkness prevailed about n o'clock in the fore- 

 noon," occasioned, the writer thought, by a change of 

 wind, turning the thick clouds of smoke back upon the 

 town ; which smoke, she says elsewhere, " dyes all 

 buildings in the city of one black colour." 



Fothergill's house in Harpur Street, Bloomsbury, was 

 in the best style of the period, and was new when he 



