You Seldom See A Person Of Any Understanding
Or Common Sense Walk In The Middle Of The Streets In London,
Excepting When They Cross Over, Which At Charing Cross And Other
Places, Where Several Streets Meet, Is Sometimes Really Dangerous.
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.
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