General Description of London.—Walk to the Palace.—Crowd in the Streets.—Shops.—Cathedral of St Paul.—Palace of the Prince of Wales.—Oddities in the Shop Windows. Wednesday, April 28.
My first business was to acquire some knowledge of the place whereof I am now become an inhabitant. I began to study the plan of London, though dismayed at the sight of its prodigious extent,—a city a league and a half from one extremity to the other, and about half as broad, standing upon level ground. It is impossible ever to become thoroughly acquainted with such an endless labyrinth of streets; and, as you may well suppose, they who 73live at one end know little or nothing of the other. The river is no assistance to a stranger in finding his way. There is no street along its banks, and no eminence from whence you can look around and take your bearings.
London, properly so called, makes but a small part of this immense capital, though the focus of business is there. Westminster is about the same size. To the east and the north is a great population included in neither of these cities, and probably equal to both. On the western side the royal parks have prevented the growth of houses, and form a gap between the metropolis and its suburb. All this is on the north side of the river. Southwark, or the Borough, is on the other shore, and a town has grown at Lambeth by the Primate’s palace, which has now joined it. The extent of ground covered with houses on this bank is greater than the area of Madrid. The population is now ascertained to exceed 74nine hundred thousand persons, nearly a twelfth of the inhabitants of the whole island.
Having studied the way to the palace, I set off. The distance was considerable: the way, after getting into the main streets, tolerably straight. There were not many passers in the by-streets; but when I reached Cheapside the crowd completely astonished me. On each side of the way were two uninterrupted streams of people, one going east, the other west. At first I thought some extraordinary occasion must have collected such a concourse; but I soon perceived it was only the usual course of business. They moved on in two regular counter currents, and the rapidity with which they moved was as remarkable as their numbers. It was easy to perceive that the English calculate the value of time. Nobody was loitering to look at the beautiful things in the shop windows; none were stopping to converse, every one was in haste, yet no one in a hurry; the 75quickest possible step seemed to be the natural pace. The carriages were numerous in proportion, and were driven with answerable velocity.
If possible, I was still more astonished at the opulence and splendour of the shops: drapers, stationers, confectioners, pastry-cooks, seal-cutters, silver-smiths, booksellers, print-sellers, hosiers, fruiterers, china-sellers,—one close to another, without intermission, a shop to every house, street after street, and mile after mile; the articles themselves so beautiful, and so beautifully arranged, that if they who passed by me had had leisure to observe any thing, they might have known me to be a foreigner by the frequent stands which I made to admire them. Nothing which I had seen in the country had prepared me for such a display of splendour.
My way lay by St Paul’s church. The sight of this truly noble building rather provoked than pleased me. The English, after erecting so grand an edifice, will not 76allow it an open space to stand in, and it is impossible to get a full view of it in any situation. The value of ground in this capital is too great to be sacrificed to beauty by a commercial nation: unless, therefore, another conflagration should lay London in ashes, the Londoners will never fairly see their own cathedral. The street which leads to the grand front has just a sufficient bend to destroy the effect which such a termination would have given it, and to obstruct the view till you come too close to see it. This is perfectly vexatious! Except St Peter’s, here is beyond comparison the finest temple in Christendom, and it is even more ridiculously misplaced than the bridge of Segovia appears, when the mules have drank up the Manzanares. The houses come so close upon one side, that carriages are not permitted to pass that way lest the foot-passengers should be endangered. The site itself is well chosen on a little rising near the river; and were it fairly opened as it ought to be, 77no city could boast so magnificent a monument of modern times.
In a direct line from hence is Temple Bar, a modern, ugly, useless gate, which divides the two cities of London and Westminster. There were iron spikes upon the top, on which the heads of traitors were formerly exposed: J— remembers to have seen some in his childhood. On both sides of this gate I had a paper thrust into my hand, which proved to be a quack doctor’s notice of some never-failing pills. Before I reached home I had a dozen of these. Tradesmen here lose no possible opportunity of forcing their notices upon the public. Wherever there was a dead wall, a vacant house, or a temporary scaffolding erected for repairs, the space was covered with printed bills. Two rival blacking-makers were standing in one of the streets, each carried a boot, completely varnished with black, hanging from a pole, and on the other arm a basket with the balls for sale. On the top of their poles 78was a sort of standard, with a printed paper explaining the virtue of the wares;—the one said that his blacking was the best blacking in the world; the other, that his was so good you might eat it.
The crowd in Westminster was not so great as in the busier city. From Charing Cross, as it is still called, though an equestrian statue has taken pl............