When our literary engagements drew us to London, we carefully avoided
living in the great Babel, but took up our residence in one of its
healthy suburbs, and, on the introduction of railways, removed to what
was actual country. A very little time showed us the exhausting and
unwholesome nature of city life. Late hours, heavy dinners, the
indulgence of what are called jovial hours, and crowded parties, would
soon have sent us whither they have sent so many of our literary
contemporaries, long, long ago. After an evening spent in one of the
crowded parties of London, I have always found myself literally
poisoned. My whole nervous system has been distressed and vitiated. I
have been miserable and incapable the next day of intellectual labor.
Nor is there any mystery about this matter. To pass some four or five
hours in a town, itself badly ventilated, amid a throng of people just
come from dinner, loaded with a medley of viands, and reeking with the
fumes of hot wines--no few of them, probably, of very moral habits,
was simply undergoing a process of asphyxia. The air was speedily
decomposed by so many lungs. Its ozone and oxygen were rapidly
absorbed, and in return the atmosphere was loaded with carbonic acid,
carbon, nitrogen, and other effluvia, from the lungs and pores of the
dense and heated company; this mischievous matter being much increased
from the products of the combustion of numerous lamps, candles, and
gas-jets.
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