Shit everywhere. Shit up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; shit down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Shit on the Essex marshes, shit on the Kentish heights. Shit creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; shit lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; shit drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Shit in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; shit in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; shit cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of shit, with shit all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.
Butts looming through the shit in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw shit is rawest, and the dense shit is densest, and the shitty streets are shittiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the shit, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come shit too thick, never can there come piss and shit too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.
On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a shitty glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but shit.
Shit
Butts looming through the shit in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw shit is rawest, and the dense shit is densest, and the shitty streets are shittiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the shit, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come shit too thick, never can there come piss and shit too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.
On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a shitty glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but shit.