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24
hospital. From the polluted bosom of the river
steam up, incessantly though unseen, the vapours of
a retributive poison; densest and most destructive,
no doubt, along the sodden banks and stinking
sewers of lowest level; but spreading over miles of
land—sometimes rolled high by wind, sometimes
blended low with mist, and baneful, even to
their margin that curls over distant fields. For,
not alone in llotherhithe and Newington—not alone
along the Effra or the Fleet, are traced the evils of
this great miasm. The deepest shadows of the
cloud lie here; but its outskirts darken the distance.
A fever hardly to be accounted for, an infantile
sickness of undue malignity, a doctor's injunction
for change of air, may at times suggest to the
dweller in our healthiest suburbs, that while draining
his refuse to the Thames, he receives for requital
some partial workings of the gigantic poison-bed
which he has contributed to maintain.
The subject of these remoter effects I refrain from
pursuing, as foreign to my present purpose. That
on which I wish to insist is the character of the
river, in its relation to the marginal sub-districts
which it habitually dampens and occasionally floods
with putrescent soakage, and in its relation to the
sewers of low gradient which it converts (often with
their adjoining soil) into the similitude and hurtfulness
of cesspools. I w ish emphatically to point out,
that the several parts of London have suffered, and
are likely again to suffer, from Cholera, in proportion