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The next object to which the house converted its attention, was a bill explaining and amending a late act for establishing a fish-market in the city of Westminster, and preventing scandalous monopolies of a few engrossing fishmongers, who imposed exorbitant prices on their fish, and, in this particular branch of traffic, gave law to above six hundred thousand of their fellow-citizens.

At last she succeeded in persuading him to measure a queen by a different standard from a woman of the people, and inducing him to arrange the manner and time of conveying the serpent into the well-guarded palace. A signal was to inform him when the decisive hour arrived. After that he was to be ready with the asp in the fish-market every day.

It is not so when the awful majesty of Milton descends from the empyrean throne of contemplation to use the language of the gutter or the fish-market. The bathos is unthinkable. The universal intellect of Bacon shrank to the paltry pursuit of place.

Nearly every town has an upper or more ancient portion built for security on a hill which was once an island, and a newer part close to the water. From the outer harbour the "mandracchio," the inner harbour, opens with the fish-market close by.

The registers of the house confirmed the validity of the claim by former precedents, and a compromise was at last effected. Rows of benches were placed on each side of the stage itself. Those on the right were allotted to the coal-heavers as representatives of Louis; the ladies of the fish-market sat on the left as the deputies of Marie Antoinette.

We now wished to see the Thames, and therefore threaded our way along Thames Street, towards London Bridge, passing through a fish-market, which I suppose to be the actual Billingsgate, whence originated all the foul language in England. Under London Bridge there is a station for steamers running to Greenwich and Woolwich.

Yet I by no means busied myself with meditating on this contradiction, but suffered a monument so astonishing quietly to work upon me by its presence. I took small, but well-situated and pleasant, lodgings, on the north side of the Fish-market, a fine, long street, where the everlasting motion came to the assistance of every unoccupied moment.

This mite of a house stood at the crook of Elbow Lane, down by the approaches to the big bridge over East River, in a street so narrow that the sun never could shine into it; yet held so strong an odor of salt water and a near-by fish-market, that the old sailor half fancied himself still afloat.

Everything distinctively Greek was expiring: fatherland, national faith, domestic life, all nobleness of action and sentiment were gone; poetry, history, and philosophy were inwardly exhausted; and nothing remained to the Athenian save the school, the fish-market, and the brothel.

There are several mediocre statues of the Princes of Orange, a vast, naked cathedral, and a royal palace of modest proportions. On many of the public buildings storks are carved, the stork being the heraldic animal of the city. Many of these birds walk about freely in the fish-market they are kept at the expense of the municipality, like the bears of Berne and the eagles of Geneva.