London. Michaelmas Term lately over , and the Lord  Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as  if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet  a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so , waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as fullgrown snowflakes ? gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another ’s umbrellas, in a general   infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot- hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other  foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since  the day broke (if this day ever broke ), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest .

(Bleak House, Ch. 1, “In Chancery”)

The City looked unpromising enough, as Bella made her way along its gritty streets. Most of its moneymills were slackening sail, or had left off grinding for the day. The master-millers had already departed, and the journeymen were departing. There was a jaded  aspect on the business lanes and courts, and the very pavements had a weary appearance, confused by  the tread of a million of feet. There must be hours of night to temper down the day’s distraction of   so feverish a place . As yet the worry of the newlystopped whirling and grinding on the part of the money-mills seemed to linger in the air, and the quiet was more like the prostration of a spent giant than the repose of one who was renewing his strength .

(Our Mutual Friend, Book III, Ch. 16, “The Feast of the Three Hobgoblins”)