56
HONG KONG EDITOR
miles away round yon corner to the South! I ran down there for a day, to recruit, last week, and there, one walks by permission of these Celestial exclusives ashore, viz. on an island, called (I don't exactly know why) - Dane's Island. It is about 3 miles in circumference, and has a triple-peaked hill on it about as high as Arthur's Seat in Edin[burgh] which I mounted; and you can understand the titillating pleasure I derived from discovering a resemblance the most remarkable between the view from this hill and that from Ehrenbreitstein on the Rhine! The absence of a fine City and bridge was all (quite enough, you will say!) and was compensated by a river-reach (in like situation, i.e. immediately below you) occupied for the length of two miles with full 50 gallant Ships of 1500 tons and downwards. The rest of the view the character of the country -- the distribution[?] of the water the mountainous horizon-bore a great resemblance to that on the Rhine
+
persons
Society here is at the very lowest intellectual ebb-and is thus unencumbered by that pretension and affectation which the half-educated and half-literary disgust you with..... whether they infest the walks of literature, science, art, or anything else. We are so far, therefore, much to be envied. I discover however ominous indications in certain editorial labours of certain here who actually arrange the types for two weekly newspapers imagine if you can, what a Canton Newspaper ought to be! Apart though from what seems, and of course is, mere banter in this - we are as a community perhaps the least enlightened, the least informed, and the most vain, and the most unamiable in our intercourse together, that ever existed of its size. An American missionary who conducts our "Monthly Repository” excellently well-is a marked but almost solitary exception. The rest of us, unless there be some "singular few" who like myself think of all this in secret and are unknown, are to a Man engrossed in business — Oh most dreadfully engrossed — it beats every bondage of lucre I ever beheld; mammon rules not only in the office, but at the dinner-table, and no doubt over the sleepers' dreams; not a moment of life spared to one hearty thought of any other topic that might interest liberal Englishmen
and, more shocking than all, not a moment of the 24 hours (I desire not to speak uncharitably and therefore only deplore what I fear to be generally not untrue) given to the consideration
56
HON EDITOR
miles away round yon corner to the South! I ran down there for a day, to recruit, last week, and there, one walks by permission of these Celestial exclusives ashore, viz. on an island, called (I don't exactly know why) - Dane's Island. It is about 3 miles in circumference, and has a triple-peaked hill on it about as high as Arthur's Seat in Edin. [burgh] which I mounted; and you can understand the titillating pleasure I derived from discovering a resemblance the most remarkable between the view from this hill and that from Ehrenbreitstein on the Rhine! The absence of a fine City and bridge was all (quite enough, you will say!) and was compensated by a river-reach (in like situation, i.e. immediately below you) occupied for the length of two miles with full 50 gallant Ships of 1500 tons and downwards. The rest of the view the character of the country -- the distribution[?] of the water the mountainous horizon-bore a great resemblance to that on the Rhine
+
persons
Society here is at the very lowest intellectual ebb-and is thus unencumbered by that pretension and affectation which the half-educated and half-literary disgust you with..... whether they infest the walks of literature, science, art, or anything else. We are so far, therefore, much to be envied. I discover however ominous indications in certain editorial labours of certain here who actually arrange the types for two weekly newspapers imagine if you can, what a Canton Newspaper ought to be! Apart though from what seems, and of course is, mere banter in this - we are as a community perhaps the least enlightened, the least informed, and the most vain, and the most unamiable in our intercourse together, that ever existed of its size. An American missionary who conducts our "Monthly Repository” excellently well-is a marked but almost solitary exception. The rest of us, unless there be some "singular few" who like myself think of all this in secret and are unknown, are to a Man engrossed in business — Oh most dreadfully engrossed — it beats every bondage of lucre I ever beheld; mammon rules not only in the office, but at the dinner-table, and no doubt over the sleepers' dreams; not a moment of life spared to one hearty thought of any other topic that might interest liberal Englishmen
and, more shocking than all, not a moment of the 24 hours (I desire not to speak uncharitably and therefore only deplore what I fear to be generally not untrue) given to the consideration
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