The oddest result for a boy's first visit to London, was a quiet mental resolution of which I said nothing to anybody. What I thought and resolved inwardly may be accurately expressed in these words — "Every Englishman who can afford it ought to see London once, as a patriotic duty, and I am not sorry to have been there to have got the duty performed; but no power on earth shall ever induce me to go to that supremely disagreeable place again!"
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
10 March 2015
That Supremely Disagreeable Place
Philip Gilbert Hamerton, An Autobiography (London: Seeley & Co., 1897), p. 100: