The best medicines are not always found in the finest shops.
Suppose, for example, if, instead of going to London Bridge to read, he had gone to Albemarle Street, and had received from the proprietors of the literary establishment in that very fashionable street permission to read the publications on the tables of the saloons there, does the reader think he would have met any balm in those publications for the case of Peter Williams?
does the reader suppose that he would have found Mary Flanders there?
He would certainly have found that highly unobjectionable publication, "Rasselas," and the "Spectator," or "Lives of Royal and Illustrious Personages," but, of a surety, no Mary Flanders; so when Lavengro met with Peter Williams, he would have been unprovided with a balm to cure his ulcerated mind, and have parted from him in a way not quite so satisfactory as the manner in which he took his leave of him; for it is certain that he might have read "Rasselas," and all the other unexceptionable works to be found in the library of Albemarle Street, over and over again, before he would have found any cure in them for the case of Peter Williams.

Therefore the author requests the reader to drop any squeamish nonsense he may wish to utter about Mary Flanders, and the manner in which Peter Williams was cured.
And now with respect to the old man who knew Chinese, but could not tell what was o'clock.

This individual was a man whose natural powers would have been utterly buried and lost beneath a mountain of sloth and laziness, had not God determined otherwise.

He had in his early years chalked out for himself a plan of life in which he had his own ease and self-indulgence solely in view; he had no particular bad passions to gratify, he only wished to lead an easy, quiet life, just as if the business of this mighty world could be carried on by innocent people fond of ease and quiet, or that Providence would permit innocent, quiet drones to occupy any portion of the earth and to cumber it.

God had at any rate decreed that this man should not cumber it as a drone.