The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 19, No. 536, March 3, 1832 — John Shaqi
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 19, No. 536, March 3, 1832Various
General
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 19, No. 536, March 3, 1832
Various
Popular literature -- Great Britain -- Periodicals
The metropolis presents certain features of peculiar interest just at
that unpopular dreamy hour when stars "begin to pale their ineffectual
fires," and the drowsy twilight of the doubtful day brightens apace
into the fulness of morning, "blushing like an Eastern bride." Then it
is that the extremes of society first meet under circumstances
well calculated to indicate the moral width between their several
conditions. The gilded chariot bowls along from square to square with
its delicate patrimonial possessor, bearing him homeward in celerity
and silence, worn with lassitude, and heated with wine quaffed at his
third rout, after having deserted the oft-seen ballet, or withdrawn in
pettish disgust at the utterance of a false harmony in the opera. A
cabriolet hurries past him still more rapidly, bearing a fashionable
physician, on the fret at having been summoned prematurely from the
comforts of a second sleep in a voluptuous chamber, on an experimental
visit to
"Raise the weak head, and stay the parting sigh,
Or with new life relume the swimming eye."
At the corners of streets of traffic, and more especially
"Where fam'd St. Giles's ancient limits spread,"
the matutinal huckster may be seen administering to costermongers,
hackney-coachmen, and "fair women without discretion," a fluid "all
hot, all hot," ycleped by the initiated elder wine, which, we should
think, might give the partakers a tolerable notion of the fermenting
beverage extracted by Tartars from mare's milk not particularly fresh.
Hard by we find a decent matron super-intending her tea-table at the
lamp-post, and tendering to a remarkably select company little, blue,
delft cups of bohea, filled from time to time from a prodigious
kettle, that simmers unceasingly on its charcoal tripod, though the
refractory cad often protests that the fuel fails before the boiling
stage is consummated by an ebullition. Hither approaches perhaps
an interesting youth from Magherastaphena, who, ere night-fall, is
destined to figure in some police-office as a "juvenile delinquent."
The shivering sweep, who has just travelled through half a dozen
stacks of chimneys, also quickens every motion of his weary little
limbs, when he comes within sight of the destined breakfast, and
beholds the reversionary heel of a loaf and roll of butter awaiting
his arrival. Another unfailing visiter is the market-gardener, on
his way to deposit before the Covent Garden piazza such a pyramid
of cabbages as might well have been manured in the soil with Master
Jack's justly celebrated bean-stalk. Surely Solomon in all his
glory was not arrayed like one of these. The female portion of
such assemblages, for the most part, consists of poor Salopian
strawberry-carriers, many of whom have walked already at least
four miles, with a troublesome burden, and for a miserable
pittance--egg-women, with sundry still-born chickens, goslings, and
turkey-pouts--and passing milk-maidens, peripatetic under the yoke of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account