The Thames no doubt in some of its reaches can
disseminate odours which are not precisely those of Araby, and samples of its waters taken at Godstow and at Greenwich might on analysis show some difference. But the historic river must not be maligned, and when the Bermondsey Borough Council seeks to discourage local bathers by putting, in poster form, the question, " Would you swim in a sewer? " it is not surprising that some up-river councils think this is going a bit too for. And the Thames, after all, has improved quite considerably. Time was when it was thoroughly foetid even at Westminster. It worried Lord Malmesbury, Foreign Secretary, more than once in the middle of the nineteenth century, quite a lot. " The pestilential smell from the Thames," he wrote in June, 1857, " is become intolerable, and there has been a question of changing the locality of Parliament," and again a year later, " the heat is becoming fearful, and the smell from the Thames so bad in White- hall Gardens, where we live, that we cannot open the windows." Spenser's adjuration to " sweet Thames " must have needed sub-
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