Babylon the Great; A Dissection and Demonstration of Men and Things in the British Capital, by the Author of 'The Modern Athens' a Dissection and Demonstration of Men and Things in the British Capital, by the Author of 'The Modern Athens'. (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. GENERALITIES. When you have known the canons of the winds That sweep, and of the rains that pour o'er Alhion; Denned by Geometry the shape that clouds Must every day assume, told the expression Which every face must wear, set bounds to thought, Said " Here discovery can no more," and fix'd Each man's achievements the next thousand years; Why then, but not till than, you may attempt A portraiture of London. Jt is Babel, In greatness, in confusion, and in change; But yet there's order in it. MS. Poem. Fkom whatever part of the world a man may come, or however he may be prepared by former experience, London will be to him a six months' wonder at the least, before he can analyze any of its parts, or understand any of its peculiarities; and those ridiculous opinions which are abroad in the world, ?some making it all wealth, others all poverty; some making it all enjoyment, others all labour and misery; some making it all knowledge VOL. I. D and intelligence, others stamping it with gross ignorance of even the most ordinary occurrences of nature; some making it all scrambling and grasping and panting after gain, others making it all squandering and dissipation; some making it the only place where a man may thrive and prosper, others denouncing it as the high road to ruin; some appealing to it as the very fountain of liberty, liberality, and political intelligence, and others as the dead weight which oppresses England, and at second hand enslaves the world;?these, and all of similar description, for no one can almost sum up their number, and which agree in nothing, except that each is false and partial as respects the whole, though true, perhaps, of some part, ought to be put aside, if one is to have any correct notion of this wonderful place. The fact is...