MILTON 77 



the English to the conveniency of foot-passengers 

 had several causes. Firstly, they set the highest 

 value upon the lives of their fellow-creatures, and in 

 that peculiar circumstance they sacrificed to pleasure 

 and conveniency. Secondly, their laws were not 

 exclusively made and executed by persons who rode 

 in their chariots. Thirdly, as the English carriages 

 moved as swiftly in the country as slowly in the 

 town, the meeting with persons who were so foolish 

 or so ill-geared as to walk a-foot would have been 

 disastrous to those wayfarers ; and in so democratic 

 a country as this the chariot-riders would have had 

 a bad time in store for them for so small a matter 

 as playing, as it were, the secular Juggernaut with 

 pedestrians. 



Eventually this moralising Frenchman reached 

 London through Rochester, which place was one 

 ong street inhabited solely by ships' carpenters and 

 dockyard men. At Greenwich, the shores of Thames 

 loomed upon his enraptured gaze, agreeably confounded 

 with long lines of trees and the masts of ships, and then 

 came delightful London, and that haven where he 

 would be — ah ! you guess it, do you not ? It was 

 Leicester Fields, le Squarr de Leicesterre of a later 

 seneration of Frenchmen. 



XVII 



Having thus disposed of this company of scribbling 

 foreigners, I will get on to Milton-next-Gravesend, 

 which immediately adjoins the town ; especially 

 will I do so because, when the old waterside lanes 

 have been explored, little remains to see besides 

 Gordon's statue and the little cottage where he used 

 to live. The high-road is not at all interesting, unless 

 indeed a Jubilee clock- tower and a number of private 

 houses of the Regent's Park order of architecture 



