I civilly declined this amicable and philosophical advice, for it had suddenly become apparent to me that my new friend was a confirmed Rogue. For opening of the Eyes there is nothing like having spent all your money. I gave him a shilling, however, out of my three and sixpence, and crossed London Bridge to see if I could find better luck on the Middlesex side, determined, if nothing offered itself during the day, to ask my way to the Barracks at the Savoy and list for a Soldier. I amused myself as I walked, with the thought that chance might so bring it about for the Sergeant who would give me the King's shilling to be the selfsame grenadier whose sconce I had broken years agone in Charlwood Chase with the Demijohn of Brandy. I had heard, as most Ignoramuses have done, I suppose, that London Streets are paved with Gold; and I found 'em as Muddy, as Stony, and as Hardhearted as I dare say they have been discovered by ten thousand Ignoramuses before my time to be. I was quite dazed and stupified with the noise and uproar of the Great City, the more perplexing to me as I was not only a Stranger, but almost a Foreigner and Outlandish Man in Great Britain. I could speak my own tongue well enough with Parson Hodge and Mr. Pinchin, but when it came to be clamoured all around me by innumerable voices, I a'most lost heart, and gave up the notion that I was an Englishman at all. It must be confessed, that half a century since we English were a very Blackguard People, and that London was about the most disreputable city in all Europe. There were few public buildings of any great note or of Majestic Proportions, save St. Paul's Cathedral, the Monument, and the Banqueting House at Whitehall. The Mansion House and the Bank of England were not yet built, and between them and the Royal Exchange (the which, noble enough in itself, was girt about, and choked up with Shops and Tenements exceeding mean and shabby), was a nasty, rubbishing, faint-smelling place, full of fruiterers and herbalists, called the Stocks Market. The crazy and rotten City Gates blocked up the chief thoroughfares, and across the bottom of Ludgate Hill yawned a marvellous foul and filthy open sewer, rich in dead dogs and cats, called the Fleet Ditch. This street was fair enough, and full of commodious houses and wealthy shops, but all about Temple Bar was a vile and horrid labyrinth of lanes and alleys, the chief and the most villanous of which was a place full of tripe shops and low taverns, called Butcher Row, leading from the Bar down to the Churchyard of St. Clement's Danes. The Strand was broad and fair enough to view as far as the New Exchange; but in lieu of that magnificent structure which Sir William Chambers, the Swedish architect, has built for Government offices, and where the Royal Academy of Arts and the Learned Societies have their apartments (when I first came to town there was no Royal Academy at all, only a Mean School for painting from the