Here is one of the vulgar errors and popular delusions of the Continent. People confound the climate of London with the climate of England; they talk of the isles of mist in the West of Europe. A very poetical idea that, but as untrue as poetical. Many parts of these islands are as clear and sunny as any of the inland countries of the Continent.
The winter-fogs of London are, indeed, awful. They surpass all imagining; he who never saw them, can form no idea of what they are. He who knows how powerfully they affect the minds and tempers of men, can understand the prevalence of that national disease--the spleen. In a fog, the air is hardly fit for breathing; it is grey-yellow, of a deep orange, and even black; at the same time, it is moist, thick, full of bad smells, and choking. The fog appears, now and then, slowly, like a melodramatic ghost, and sometimes it sweeps over the town as the simoom over the desert. At times, it is spread with equal density over the whole of that ocean of houses on other occasions, it meets with some invisible obstacle, and rolls itself into intensely dense masses, from which the passengers come forth in the manner of the student who came out of the cloud to astonish Dr. Faust. It is hardly necessary to mention, that the fog is worst in those parts of the town which are near the Thames.
When the sun has set in London (the curious in this respect, will do well to consult the Almanack), and when the weather is tolerably clear, the moon appears to govern the night. The moon is a more regular guest in London than the sun; and the example of these celestial bodies is followed by the great journals, the issue of the evening papers being much more regular than that of the morning papers. The London moon is, after all, not very different from the moon in Germany. It is quite as pale and romantic; it is the confidant of lovesick maidens and adventurous pickpockets.
Traveller from the Continent, enjoy the London moon with method and reason! If heaven favored you by sending you into the street on a beautiful, splendid, transparent, moonlit night, in which the shades of Ossian and Mignon sit by the rivers or under the limetrees, while all the poetry you smuggled from your native land awakes in your heart: traveller, if such good fortune is yours, why, then, the best thing you can do, is to go to the Italian opera, for the moonlit nights of this country are as treacherous as its politics. They seem all calm and peaceful; but they are rife with colds and ague. They are most beautiful, but also most dangerous. Every Englishman will tell you as much, and advise you to increase your stock of flannel in proportion to the beauty of the night.