 by
five o'clock I start out of bed, in consequence of the still more dreadful alarm
made by the country carts, and noisy rustics bellowing green pease under my
window. If I would drink water, I must quaff the maukish contents of an open
aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement; or swallow that which comes from
the river Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster -
Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed
of all the drugs, minerals, and poisons, used in mechanics and manufacture,
enriched with the putrefying carcases of beasts and men; and mixed with the
scourings of all the wash-tubs, kennels, and common sewers, within the bills of
mortality.
    This is the agreeable potation, extolled by the Londoners, as the finest
water in the universe - As to the intoxicating potion, sold for wine, it is a
vile, unpalatable, and pernicious sophistication, balderdashed with cyder,
corn-spirit, and the juice of sloes. In an action at law, laid against a carman
for having staved a cask of port, it appeared from the evidence of the cooper,
that there were not above five gallons of real wine in the whole pipe, which
held above a hundred, and even that had been brewed and adulterated by the
merchant at Oporto. The bread I eat in London, is a deleterious paste, mixed up
with chalk, alum, and bone-ashes; insipid to the taste, and destructive to the
constitution. The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration; but they
prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter than the meal of corn: thus
they sacrifice their taste and their health, and the lives of their tender
infants, to a most absurd gratification of a mis-judging eye; and the miller, or
the baker, is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his
profession. The same monstrous depravity appears in their veal, which is
bleached by repeated bleedings, and other villainous arts, till there is not a
drop of juice left in the body, and the poor animal is paralytic before it dies;
so void of all taste, nourishment, and savour, that a man might dine as
comfortably on a white fricasee of kid-skin gloves, or chip hats from Leghorn.
    As they have discharged the natural colour from their bread, their
butcher's-meat, and poultry, their cutlets, ragouts, fricasees, and sauces of
all kinds; so they insist upon having the complexion of their pot-herbs
