“Sure your ancestors contrived your narrow streets in the days of wheel-barrows, before those greater engines, carts, were invented. Is your climate so hot, that as you walk, you need umbrellas of tiles to intercept the sun? Or, are your shambles so empty, that you are afraid to take in fresh air, lest it should sharpen your stomachs? Oh, the goodly landslip of Old Fish Street, which, had it not had the ill luck to be crooked, was narrow enough to have been your founder’s perspective! And where the garrets, (perhaps not for want of architecture, but through abundance of amity) are so made, that opposite neighbours may shake hands without stirring from home. Is unanimity of inhabitants in wise cities better exprest than by their coherence and uniformity of building: where streets begin, continue and end, in a like stature and shape? But yours (as if they were raised in a general insurrection, where every man hath a several design) differ in all things that can make distinction. Here stands one that aims to be a Palace, and, next it, another that professes to be a hovel; here a giant, there a dwarf: here slender, there broad: and all most admirably different in faces as well as in their height and bulk. I was about to defie any Londoner, who dares pretend there is so much ingenious correspondence in this City, as that he can shew me one house like another: yet your houses seem to be reverend and formal, being compared to the fantastical looks of the modern: which have more ovals, niches, and angles, than are in your custards, and are inclosed with pasteboard walls, like those of malicious Turks, who, because themselves are not immortal, and cannot dwell for ever where they build, therefore wish not to be at charge to provide such lastingness as may entertain their children out of the rain: so slight and prettily gaudy, that if they could more, they would pass for pageants. It is your custom, where men vary often the mode of their habits, to term the nation fantastical: but where streets continually change fashion, you should make haste to chain up the city, for it is certainly mad. [Illustration: _Part of_ CHEAPSIDE _with the_ CROSS, &c. _as they appeared in_ 1660 From a contemporary print.]