Transcribed from Tobias Smollett's " Humphry Clinker " - a hilarious 18th C account of life in the grand metropolis.

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With the sharp sensitivity of " a man without skin" Tobias Smollett humorously attacked the frivolity and foibles of eighteenth-century England. Humphrey Clinker is his mirthful tale of a tour by coach and four through cities and countryside. as misadventure follows misadventure, each character reveals his true self by giving his own conflicting view of the incidents, places, and people encountered along the way. The result is an entertaining and realistic picture of that wonderful age when gentlemen duelled, ladies swooned, and servants rose from rags to riches.

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...continued from part 2, below...

... a circumstance sufficient to turn a Dutchman's stomach, even if his nose was not saluted in every alley with the sweet flavour of "fresh" mackarel, selling by retail - This is not the season for oysters; nevertheless, it may not be amiss to mention, that the right Colchester are kept in slime pits, occasionally overflowed by the sea; and that the green colour, so much admired by the voluptuaries of this metropolis, is occasioned by the vitriolic scum, which rises on the surface of the stagnant and stinking water - Our rabbits are bred and fed in the poulterer's cellar, where they have neither air nor exercise, consequently they must be firm in flesh, and delicious in flavour; and there is no game to be had for love or money.

It must be owned, the Covent-garden affords some good fruit; which, however, is always engrossed by a few individuals of over-grown fortune, at an exorbitant price ( nothing changed there then - ed ), so that nothing else than the refuse of the market falls to the share of the community; and that is distributed by such filthy hands, as I cannot look at it without loathing. It was but yesterday that I saw a dirty barrow-bunter in the street, cleaning her dusty fruit with her own spittle; and, who knows but some fine lady of St. Jame's parish might admit into her delicate mouth those very cherries, which had been rolled and moistened between the filthy, and perhaps ulcerated chops of a St. Giles huckster - I need not dwell upon the palid, contaminated mash, which they call strawberries; soiled and tossed by greasy paws through twenty baskets crusted with dirt; and then presented with the worst milk; thickened with the worst flour, into a bad likeness of cream; but the milk itself should not pass unanalysed, the produce of faded cabbage leaves and sour draff, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco quids from foot passengers, over-flowings from mud carts, spatterings from coach wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by rogeish boys for the joke's sake, the spewings of infants, who have slabbered in the tin measure, which is thrown back in that condition among the milk for the benefit of the next customer; and finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of Milk Maid.....

TBC in Part Three - do tune back ye bloggers for yet more niceties of olde London town.