The New Hampshire Gazette And Historical Chronicle

A Description of LONDON, from the EXPEDITION OF HUMPHRY CLINKER.

In London, I am pent up in frowzy lodgings, where there is not room enough to swing a cat; and I breathe the steams of endless putrefaction; and these would undoubtedly produce a petilence, if they were not qualified by the gross acid of sea-coal, which is itself a pernicious nuisance to lungs of any delicacy of texture: but even this boasted corrector cannot prevent those languid, sallow looks, that distinguish the inhabitants of LONDON from those ruddy swains that lead a country life. I go to bed after midnight, jaded & restless from the dissipations of the day—I start every hour from my sleep, at the horrid noise of the watchmen bawling the hour through every street, and thundering at every door; a set of useless fellows, who serve no other purpose but that of disturbing the repose of the inhabitants: and by five o'clock I start out of my bed, in consequence of the still more dreadful alarms of the country carts, and noisy rustics bellowing green peas under my window. If I must quaff the mawkish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement, or swallow that which comes from the river Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster—Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals, and poisons, used in mechanics and manufactures, enriched with the putrefying carcases of beasts and men; and mixed with the scourings of all the wash-tubs, kennels, and common sewers, within the bills of mortality.

O! This is the agreeable potation, extolled by the Londoners as the finest water in the universe.—As to the intoxicating potion, sold for wine, it is a vile, unpalatable and pernicious sophistication, balderdashed with cider, corn-spirit, and the juice of sloes. In an action at law, laid against a commoner for having saved a cask of port, it appeared from the evidence of the cooper, that there were not above five gallons of real wine in the whole pipe, which held considerable above a hundred, and even that had been brewed and adulterated by the merchant at Oporto. The bread I eat in London is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone-ashes; insipid to the taste, and destructive to the constitution. The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration; but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because whiter than the meal of corn: it is thus they sacrifice their taste and health, and the lives of their tender infants, to a most absurd gratification of a misjudging eye; and the miller, or the baker, is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession. The same monstrous depravity appears in their veal which is bleached by repeated bleedings, and other villainous arts, 'till there is not a drop of juice left in the body, and the poor animal is paralytic before it dies: so void of all taste, nourishment, and savour, that a man might dine as comfortably on a white fricassee of kid-skin gloves, or chip hats from Leghorn. As they have discharged their natural colours from their bread, their butchers meat and poultry, their cutlets, ragouts, fricassees, and sauces of all kinds, so they insist upon having the complexion of their pot herbs mended even at the hazard of their lives. Perhaps you may hardly believe they can be

o mad as to boil their greens with brass half-pence, in order to improve their colour: and yet nothing is more true. -Indeed without this improvement in the colour, they have no personal merit. They are produced in an artificial soil, and taste of nothing but the dunghills, from whence they spring. My cabbage, cauliflower, and asparagus in the country, are as much superior in flavour to those that are sold in Covent-Garden, as my heath mutton is to that of St. James's market: which, in fact is neither lamb nor mutton, but something betwixt the two, gorged in the rank fens of Lincoln and Essex. Pale, coarse, and frowzy—As for the pork it is the flesh of an abominable carnivorous animal, fed with horse-flesh and distillers grains; and the poultry is all rotten, in consequence of a fever, occasioned by the infamous practice of sewing up the gut, that they may be the sooner fattened in coops, in consequence of this cruel retention. On the fish I need say nothing in this hot weather, but that it comes forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, fourscore, and a hundred miles by land-carriage; a circumstance sufficient, without any comment, to turn a Dutchman's stomach, even if his nose was not saluted in every alley by the sweet flavour of fresh mackerel, selling by retail.- This is not the season for oysters; nevertheless, it may not be amiss to mention, that the right Colchester are kept in slime-pits, occasionally overflowed by the sea; and that the green colour, so much admired by the voluptuaries of this metropolis, is occasioned by the vitriolic scum, which rises on the surface of the stagnant and stinking water---

Our rabbits are bred and fed in the poulterers cellar, where they have neither air nor exercise, consequently they must be firm in flesh, and delicious in flavour: and there is no game to be had for love or money. It must be owned that Covent-garden affords some good fruit, which is always engrossed by a few individuals of overgrown fortune, at an exorbitant price: so that little else than the refuse of the market falls to the share of the community, and that is distributed by such filthy hands as I cannot look at without loathing. It was but yesterday that I saw a dirty barrow-bunter in the street, cleansing her fruit with her own spittle; and, who knows but some fine lady of St. James's parish might admit into her delicate mouth those very cherries which had been rolled and moistened between the filthy, and perhaps, ulcerated chops of a St. Giles's huckster- I need not dwell upon the pallid, contaminated mash, which they call strawberries, soiled and tossed by greasy paws through twenty baskets crusted with dirt, and then presented with the worst milk, thickened with the worst flour into a bad likeness of cream: but the milk itself should not pass unanalysed, the produce of faded cabbage-leaves and our draff, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul risings, discharged from doors and windows, spittle & tobacco-quids from foot-passengers, overflowings from mud-carts, spatterings from coach-wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by the rogueish boys for the joke's sake, the pewings of infants, who have slabbered in the tin-measures, which is thrown back in that condition among the milk, for the benefit of the next customer: and finally, the vermin that drop from the rags of the nasty drab, that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid. ei I shall conclude this catalogue of London with the table-beer guiltless of hops and malt, vapid and nauseous, much fitter to facilitate the operation of a vomit, than to quench thirst and promote digestion; the tallowy rancid mass, called butter, manufactured with candle-grease and kitchen stuff; and their fresh eggs imported from France and Scotland. Now, all these enormities might be remedied with a very little attention of the police or civil regulation; but the wise patriots of London have taken it into their heads, that all regulation is inconsistent with liberty; and that every man ought to live in his own way without restraint---Nay, as there is not one enough among them to be discomposed by the nuisances I have mentioned, they may, for aught I care, wallow in the mire of their own pollution....