For my own part, now the fit is past, I have no hesitation in declaring, that a mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit-door of Drury Lane Theatre, just at the hour of six, gives me ten thousand sincerer pleasures, than I could ever receive from all the flocks of silly sheep that ever whitened the plains of Arcadia or Epsom Downs.

This passion for crowds is nowhere feasted so full as in London.  The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy who can be dull in Fleet Street.  I am naturally inclined to hypochondria, but in London it vanishes, like all other ills.  Often, when I have felt a weariness or distaste at home, have I rushed out into her crowded Strand, and fed my humor, till tears have wetted my cheek for unutterable sympathies with the multitudinous moving picture, which she never fails to present at all hours, like the scenes of a shifting pantomime.

The very deformities of London, which give distaste to others, from habit do not displease me.  The endless succession of shops where Fancy miscalled Folly is supplied with perpetual gauds and toys, excite in me no puritanical aversion.  I gladly behold every appetite supplied with its proper food.  The obliging customer, and the obliged tradesman—­things which live by bowing, and things which exist but for homage—­do not affect me with disgust; from habit I perceive nothing but urbanity, where other men, more refined, discover meanness:  I love the very smoke of London, because it has been the medium most familiar to my vision.  I see grand principles of honor at work in the dirty ring which encompasses two combatants with fists, and principles of no less eternal justice in the detection of a pickpocket.  The salutary astonishment with which an execution is surveyed, convinces me more forcibly than a hundred volumes of abstract polity, that the universal instinct of man in all ages has leaned to order and good government.

Thus an art of extracting morality from the commonest incidents of a town life is attained by the same well-natured alchemy with which the Foresters of Arden, in a beautiful country,

  “Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
  Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

Where has spleen her food but in London!  Humor, Interest, Curiosity, suck at her measureless breasts without a possibility of being satiated.  Nursed amid her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes!

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,

A LONDONER.

ON BURIAL SOCIETIES;

AND

THE CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER.

* * * * *

TO THE EDITOR OF “THE REFLECTOR.”

Mr. Reflector,—­I was amused the other day with having the following notice thrust into my hand by a man who gives out bills at the corner of Fleet Market.  Whether he saw any prognostics about me, that made him judge such notice seasonable, I cannot say; I might perhaps carry in a countenance (naturally not very florid) traces of a fever which had not long left me.  Those fellows have a good instinctive way of guessing at the sort of people that are likeliest to pay attention to their papers.