Of really old buildings, wooden and small, and in any conventional sense interesting, there is little indeed, but such as it is it takes the eye instantly. Looking along the swarthy, unequal frontage of brick houses that are no houses--somewhat as the _biblia abiblia_ of Charles Lamb are among books,--you find the face of a single human little house, its timber looking old, delicate, and pale among the bricks; a Limehouse harbour-master's title is written across the face, and it is in fact dwelt in--propped in the serried row that has the sightless aspect of a barn. There is therefore almost nothing of what used to be called the picturesque. Nevertheless, the whole continuous line has far more approach to beauty than any street of 'handsome' houses with columns and porticoes in the whole of western London; moreover, it is much finer than Regent Street. For the form of the normal warehouse is anything but bad; there is a good deal of plain wall, which--unless a building be in every way wrong--gives dignity; the windows are not too many, and for a mile at once the general repeated form is that of a single gable and a flat front. With this you cannot have anything entirely corrupt. True, now and then there is a region or tract of buildings--'works,' these seem to be, not warehouses--that touch the extremity of possible ugliness and dreariness, and are flat-roofed, rectangular, and, without exaggeration, black. These are very few--two or three at the most--and all on the right bank. Otherwise the skyline of buildings is low, broken, pointed, and very various. Low as it is, it is always--seen from the deck of a boat--the very skyline. From that low point of view the scene is made of river and boats, warehouses, and sky. Of the thronging town beyond, on either bank, nothing appears; you have got rid of streets, and, with streets, of all the movement, the rattle, the people, the inland perspectives. The face of river-side buildings looks almost unbroken; it lets no glimpse pass through. There might be marshes or fields beyond; it is only by the map that you know these two dark banks to be the edges and hems of cities.