If the narrow streets of Cologne be famous, or rather infamous, for bad smells, it is to be recollected that the _waters_ of that ancient city are more valuable than the _wines_ of the neighbouring Rhine:—that they are carried to every corner of the earth—and prized for their delicious flavour, beyond the richest productions of Rudesheim or Johannisberg. Thus good cometh out of evil—and the most grateful perfume is exhaled from the most malodorous city of Europe. “Give a dog a bad name,” and the sooner you shoot him the better. Yet if a stranger arrived at Cologne, by day or by night, not knowing the name of the place, he might traverse its numberless and crooked streets, without remarking more disagreeable scents than his nose would encounter on the banks of the Tiber, the Arno, or the Seine—in the wynds of Auld Reekie, the Gorbals of Glasgow, the purlieus of the Liffey—or even of father Thames, between Puddle-dock and Deptford. I will not maintain that all the little rivulets which meander the streets of this town, after a shower of rain, are the veritable “_Eau de Cologne_” of Messieurs Farina; but I must say that the olfactories of my fair countrywoman of the “Souvenirs,” were more delicate than impartial, when she penned the following sentence. “But the dreadful effluvia of the black, filthy streams that defile every street, penetrated even through the folds of pocket-handkerchiefs soaked in perfume.”—_Souvenir_, p. 93. Fiction being the “soul of poetry,” we need not wonder that the BARD should seize the opportunity of having his fling at poor Cologne. Accordingly COLERIDGE exercised his wit and his acrimony in the following lines, in which he apostrophises CLOACINA, and the nymphs, “who reign o’er sewers and sinks.” “The river Rhine, it is well known, Doth wash the city of Cologne, But tell me nymphs, what power divine Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?”