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Country-Sublime tended to be about the vertical. In these passages we see how City-Sublime is about horizontality : "vistas stretching"…. "street after street, square after square" (It was only in the twentieth century that the City-Sublime could go vertical ; though Samuel Johnson remarked on the height of Edinburgh tenements in the eighteenth.)

Even those shocked, often morally shocked, by London could not resist the Sublime aesthetic. Heine in 1826 couldn't help himself, caught between thrill and appal:
"I have seen the most remarkable phenomenon that the world has to show to the amazed mind of man. I have seen it and I am still amazed. In my memory there remains the stone forest of houses and in between the surging stream of vivid human faces, with all their gay passions, with all their horrible flurry of love and hunger and hate-I mean London."

But just as the picturesque aesthetic required picturesque tourists, so the newly observed city required its own aesthete: its own detached observer: that person was (or later became) the 'flaneur', the city loafer, stroller, observer. He was an essentially nineteenth century figure, a man of the later consumerist and capitalist city. The earlier Samuel Johnson once endearingly tried to help a dock worker pick up a load, generally getting in the way (to the embarrassment of Boswell). One cannot imagine the nineteenth century flaneurs doing any such thing. Lamb was so detached as to write an essay, not particularly ironic, regretting the dwindling number of beggars, whose picturesqueness, like a good aesthete, he loved. Like Dickens, who sought in cities "the attraction of repulsion" Lamb writes in 1802:

"The very deformities of London, which give distaste to others, from habit do not displease me. The endless succession of shops where Fancy (mis-called Folly) is supplied with perpetual new gauds and toys, excite in me no puritanical aversion. I gladly behold every appetite supplied with its proper food.....I love the very smoke of London, because it has been the medium most familiar to my vision."

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