Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/58

44 to about $250, which, as it turned out, had to last him for a year and a half in a town which was by no means cheap. Good lodgings, there being no hotels, came to about $7 or $8 a week (£ 1.10), and even if meals were only a few shillings extra this was too dear.3

Emanuel lived in working London, rough, noisy, combative, and highly individualistic, especially in the disposal of what should have been sewage but instead was thrown out of doors and windows to land, if the passersby were lucky, in open gutters. Showers made these overflow and diffuse what Gay called "ungrateful odours," joining the symphony of smells that was orchestrated by the boiling caldrons of the chandlers, open butcher shops, whale oil, piles of antique cheese, fish "long absent from the sea," not to mention the age-old open deposits of "night soil."

The man who was later to describe the stinks of "hell" in such plain detail had plenty of olfactory memories on which to draw for comparison.

In that plebeian London, John Gay warned, "if clothed in black you tread the busy town," you must avoid barbershops where powdered periwigs would shed clouds on you, and the baker and miller likewise. If you were "in youthful colors," look out for the chimney sweep, the dustman's cart, the tallow spots from the chandler's basket, and don't run into the "surly butcher's greasy tray," and, whatever you do, cling to the wall! Hold the hands of "waggish boys that play the stunted besom" on the pavement, watch out for the rotten eggs aimed at the fellow in the pillory, be careful of pickpockets at night, and above all be wary of the "ladies of Drury Lane."

They were as common as the smells, and by no means confined to Drury Lane. Gay speaks of one of those man-catchers with "her livid eyes," whose "hollow cheeks with artful blushes glow." "Beneath the lamp her tawdry ribbons glare. She darts from sarsnet ambush wily leers, Twitches the sleeve—or with familiar airs, her fan will pat your cheek."

They, too, like the smells, were to appear realistically in Swedenborg's visions of hell, but they probably played no great part in the London life of Emanuel Swedberg. His release from home had not been from puritan sex restraint into licence—eighteenth-century