It has a strange appearance--especially in the Strand, where there
is a constant succession of shop after shop, and where, not
unfrequently, people of different trades inhabit the same house--to
see their doors or the tops of their windows, or boards expressly
for the purpose, all written over from top to bottom with large
painted letters. Every person, of every trade or occupation, who
owns ever so small a portion of a house, makes a parade with a sign
at his door; and there is hardly a cobbler whose name and profession
may not be read in large golden characters by every one that passes.
It is here not at all uncommon to see on doors in one continued
succession, "Children educated here," "Shoes mended here," "Foreign
spirituous liquors sold here," and "Funerals furnished here;" of all
these inscriptions. I am sorry to observe that "Dealer in foreign
spirituous liquors" is by far the most frequent. And indeed it is
allowed by the English themselves, that the propensity of the common
people to the drinking of brandy or gin is carried to a great
excess; and I own it struck me as a peculiar phraseology, when, to
tell you that a person is intoxicated or drunk, you hear them say,
as they generally do, that he is in liquor. In the late riots,
which even yet are hardly quite subsided, and which are still the
general topic of conversation, more people have been found dead near
empty brandy-casks in the streets, than were killed by the musket-
balls of regiments that were called in. As much as I have seen of
London within these two days, there are on the whole I think not
very many fine streets and very fine houses, but I met everywhere a
far greater number and handsomer people than one commonly meets in
Berlin. It gives me much real pleasure when I walk from Charing
Cross up the Strand, past St. Paul's to the Royal Exchange, to meet
in the thickest crowd persons from the highest to the lowest ranks,