To raise as much noise as they can, to make themselves as offensive as possible to the quietly disposed, to spoil natural beauties and break things,—these seem to be the aims of their enjoyment.
If they find a pleasant stretch of clean sand, where barefooted children happily disport themselves, they will fill the place with lurid profanity, and departing leave behind them a Tom Tiddler's heap of broken bottles, threatening the security and comfort of every playing baby in the neighbourhood. If they find a pretty flower-garden, where they are politely requested to "keep off the grass," they will deliberately and purposely trample on the sequestered patch, to prove their insolent superiority over regulations framed for their and the general public's profit and advantage.
Oh, but it is sad to see! There is nothing more depressing, more crushing to one's aspirations for the people's greater and truer liberty.
The usurer's greed, the tyranny of upstart wealth, labour's subjection and dependence, poverty's hunger—all these may be cured; but what shall be done with yahoos whose chief delight lies in spoiling the enjoyment of others?
Ah, me! I wish I had not been to Yarmouth.
MY INTRODUCTION TO RESPECTABILITY
It was a Sunday in London—gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick and mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look to them out of windows in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the plague were in the city, and the dead-carts were going round. Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people.
Charles Dickens.
When, as a boy of ten (driven from Paris by General Trochu's proclamation before the siege as a bouche inutile), I first set my eyes on the world's metropolis, my impressions were not favourable. Ugh! that first Sunday in London! It was like a day of death, a day among the tombs.