Page:The world's show, 1851, or, The adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and family, who came up to London to "enjoy themselves", and to see the Great Exhibition (IA worldsshow1851or00mayh).pdf/17

 sons, nine daughters, fourteen wives, three widows, one 'squire, and one pauper of eighty-six years of age.

"But," says the Pudding-lane reader, "if this be the entire community, how do the people live? where are the shops? where that glorious interchange of commodities, without which society cannot exist! Where do they get their bread—their meat—their tea—their sugar—their clothing—their shoes? If ill, what becomes of them? Their children, where are they taught? Their money, where is it deposited? Their letters?—for surely they cannot be cut off from all civilization by the utter absence of post-office and postman! Are they beyond the realms of justice, that no attorney is numbered amongst their population? They have a constable—where, then, the magistrate? They have a parish-clerk—then where the clergyman?"

Alas! reader, the picturesque is seldom associated with the conveniences or luxuries of life. Wash the peasant-girl's face and bandoline her hair, she proves but a bad vignette for that most unpicturesque of books—the Book of Beauty. Whitewash the ruins and make them comfortable; what artist would waste his pencils upon them? So is it with Buttermere: there the traveller will find no butcher, no baker, no grocer, no draper, no bookseller, no pawnbroker, no street-musicians, no confectioners, and no criminals. Burst your pantaloons—oh, mountain tourist!—and it is five miles to the nearest tailor. Wear the sole of your shoe to the bone on the sharp craigs of Robinson or of the Goat-gills, and you must walk to Lowes Water for a shoemaker. Be mad with the toothache, caught from continued exposure to the mountain breeze, and, go which way you will—to Keswick or to Cockermouth—it is ten miles to the nearest chemist. Be seized with the pangs of death, and you must send twenty miles, there and back, for Dr. Johnson to ease your last moments. To apprise your friends by letter of your danger, a messenger must go six miles before the letter can be posted. If you desire to do your duty to those you may leave behind, you must send three leagues to Messrs. Brag and Steal to make your will, and they must travel the same distance before either can perform the office for you. You wish to avail yourself of the last consolations of the Church; the clergyman, who oscillates in his duties between Withorp and Buttermere (an interval of twelve miles), has, perhaps, just been sent for to visit the opposite parish, and is now going, at a hard gallop, in the contrary direction, to another parishioner. Die! and you must be taken five miles in a cart to be buried; for though Buttermere boasts a church, it stands upon a rock, from which no sexton has yet been found hardy enough to quarry out a grave!

But these are the mere dull, dry matters of fact of Buttermere—the prose of its poetry. The ciphers tell us nothing of the men or their mountains. We might as well be walking in the Valley of Dry Bones, with Maculloch, Porter, Macgregor, or the Editor of the Economist, for our guides. Such teachers strip all life of its emotions, and dress the earth in one quaker's suit of drab. All they know of