If I would drink water, I must quaff the
maukish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of
defilement; or swallow that which comes from the river Thames,
impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster -- Human
excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is
composed of all the drugs, minerals, and poisons, used in
mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying carcasses
of beasts and men; and mixed with the scourings of all the wash-tubs,
kennels, and common sewers, within the bills of mortality.
This is the agreeable potation, extolled by the Londoners, as the
finest water in the universe -- As to the intoxicating potion, sold
for wine, it is a vile, unpalatable, and pernicious
sophistication, balderdashed with cyder, corn-spirit, and the
juice of sloes. In an action at law, laid against a carman for
having staved a cask of port, it appeared from the evidence of
the cooper, that there were not above five gallons of real wine
in the whole pipe, which held above a hundred, and even that had
been brewed and adulterated by the merchant at Oporto. The bread
I cat in London, is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk,
alum, and bone-ashes; insipid to the taste, and destructive to
the constitution.
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