Note 190 — Chapter V

Byron has said “there would be nothing to make the canal of Venice, more poetical than that of Paddington, were it not for its artificial adjuncts.” Vide Cunningham’s Hand-book. The artificial adjuncts of the Paddington Canal, from its first formation to the present time, have been any thing but poetical. It is true an imaginative Cockney might, in snowy weather, have imbibed his notion of the Alps from what he then saw on the banks of this canal; for immense heaps of dust and ashes towered high above the house-tops; and these artificial mountains are said to have been worth ten thousand pounds a-piece.