134 PRÆTERITA-I

admitted by lifting of latch, manipulated by the head clerk’s hand in the counting-house, without stirring from his seat.

154. This unpretending establishment, as I said, formed part of the western side of Billiter Street, a narrow trench -it may have been thirty feet wide-admitting, with careful and precise driving, the passing each other of two brewers’ drays. I am not sure that this was possible at the ends of the street, but only at a slight enlargement opposite the brewery in the middle. Effectively a mere trench between three-storied houses of prodigious brickwork, thoroughly well laid, and presenting no farther entertainment whatever to the æsthetic beholder than the alternation of the ends and sides of their beautifully level close courses of bricks, and the practised and skillful radiation of those which formed the window lintels.

Typical, I repeat, of the group of London edifices, east of the Mansion House, and extending to the Tower; the under-hill picturesqueness of which, however, were in early days an entirely forbidden district to me, lest I should tumble into the docks; but Fenchurch and Leadenhall Streets, familiar to me as the perfection of British mercantile state and grandeur,-the reader may by effort, though still dimly, conceive the effect on my imagination of the fantastic gables of Ghent, and orange-scented cortiles of Genoa.¹

155. I can scarcely account to myself, on any of the ordinary principles of resignation, for the undimmed tranquillity of pleasure with which, after these infinite excitements in foreign lands, my father would return to his desk opposite the brick wall of the brewery, and I to my niche behind the drawing-room chimney-piece. But to both of us, the steady occupations, the beloved samenesses, and the sacred customs of home were more precious than all the fervours of wonder in things new to us, or delight in scenes of incomparable beauty. Very early, indeed, I had found that novelty was soon exhausted, and beauty, though

¹ [For an additional passage which here follows in the MS, see the Appendix; below, p. 622.]

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