Part II.
——Rushing along, leaving innumerable chimneys behind pouring out sempiternal smoke; the air filled with a perpetual clank of hammers, the crashing of enormous wheels, and jangling of colossal chains; every human being within sight being as black as a negro, and the gust from the shore giving the closest resemblance to a blast between the tropics. Our steamer played her part handsomely in this general effort to stifle the population, and threw columns of smoke, right and left, as she moved through the bends of the river, thick enough to have choked an army of coal-heavers. I am as little of a sentimentalist as any man; I have always pronounced Rousseau an impostor. I regretted that the pillory has been abolished in the days of the modern novelists of France; but I was nearly in a state of suffocation, and some allowance must be made for the wrath of asphyxia. As I looked on the fuliginous sky, and the cineritious earth, on the ember-coloured trees, and half vitrified villas, the whole calcined landscape, I involuntarily asked myself, what is the good of all this hammering, forging, and roasting alive? Is man to be made perfect in the manner of a Westphalia ham? or is it to be the crowning glory of a nation, that she is the great nail-maker to the civilized globe? Is her whole soul to be absorbed in the making of chain-cables and cotton-twist? Are all her aspirations to breathe only linsey-woolsey, Yorkshire broadcloth, and Birmingham buttons? Are the cheeks of her maids to grow pallid, for the sake of clothing the lower portion of a Hindoo mountaineer in flannel, and the forehead of an African savage in book-muslin? Or are our men, by nature the finest race in the world, to be crippled into the physiognomy and faculties of baboons, merely to make shawls for the Queen of Madagascar, or slippers for the great Mogul?
I was startled, by an universal run towards the head of the steamer. Men, women, children, lap-dogs, and all rushed forward, followed by an avalanche of bandboxes, which, heaped half chimney high, had heaved with a sudden lurch of the helm, and over-spread the deck with a chaos of caps, bonnets, and inferior appendages to the toilet. In the cloud of smoke above, around, and below, we had as nearly as possible run ashore upon the Isle of Dogs. The captain, as all the regular reports on occasions of disaster say, behaved in this extremity “with a coolness, a firmness, and a sagacity worthy of all admiration.” He had made nine hundred and ninety-nine voyages, to Margate before; it was therefore wholly impossible that he could have shot the head of his ship into the mud of the left bank of the Thames on his thousandth transit. The fact, however, seemed rather against the theory. But as I was not drowned, was not a shareholder in the vessel, and have an antipathy to courts-martial, I turned from the brawling of the present, to the bulletins of the past, and thought of Dog-land in its glory.