“You would think me a malicious traveller if I should still gaze on your misshapen streets, and take no more notice of the beauty of your river: therefore, I will pass the importunate noise of your watermen (who snatch at fares as if they were to catch prisoners, plying the gentry so uncivilly, as if they had never rowed any other passengers but bearwards) and now step into one of your peascod boats, whose tilts are not so sumptuous as the roofes of gundaloes, nor when you are within are you at the ease of a chaise-à-bras. The commodity and trade of your river belong to yourselves: but give a stranger leave to share in the pleasure of it, which will hardly be in the prospect of freedom of air, unless prospect, consisting of variety, be made up with here a palace, there a wood-yard: here a garden, there a brew-house: here dwells a lord, there a dyer, and between both, _duomo commune_. If freedom of air be inferred in the liberty of the subject, where every private man hath authority, for his own profit, to smoak up a magistrate, then the air of your Thames is open enough, because it is equally free. I will forbear to visit your courtly neighbours at Wapping, not that it will make me giddy to shoot your Bridge, but that I am loth to disturb the civil silence of Billingsgate, which is so great, as if the mariners were always landing to storm the harbour: therefore, for brevity’s sake, I will put to shoar again, though I should be constrained, even without my galoshoes, to land at Puddle Dock. “I am now returned to visit your houses, where the roofs are so low, that I presume your ancestors were very mannerly and stood bare to their wives: for I cannot discern how they could wear their high-crowned hats: yet, I will enter, and therein oblige you much, when you know my aversion to a certain weed that governs amongst your coarser acquaintance as much as lavender amongst your coarser linen; to which, in my apprehension, your sea-coal smoke seems a very Portugal perfume. I should here hasten to a period, for fear of suffocation, if I thought you so ungracious as to use it in public assemblies: and yet, I see it grows so much in fashion, that methinks your children begin to play with broken pipes instead of corals, to make way for their teeth. You will find my visit short; I cannot stay to eat with you, because your bread is too heavy, and you disdain the light substance of herbs. Your drink is too thick, and yet you are seldom over-curious in washing your glasses. Nor will I lodge with you, because your beds seem no bigger than coffins: and your curtains so short, as they will hardly serve to inclose your carriers in summer, and may be held, if taffata, to have lined your grand-sires’ skirts.