LONDON

"Now I'm sick to go 'Ome-go 'Ome-go 'Ome! No, I ain't mammysick, because my uncle brung me up, but I'm sick for London again; sick for the sounds of 'er, an' the sights of 'er, and the stinks of 'er; orange-peel and hasphalte an' gas comin' in over Vaux'all Bridge. Sick for the rail goin' down to Box 'Ill with your gal on your knee an' a new clay pipe in your face. That, an' the Stran' lights where you knows ev'ry one, an' the Copper that takes you up is a old friend that tuk you up before, when you was a little, smitchy boy lying loose 'tween the Temple an' the Dark Harches."

Rudyard Kipling. ("Stanley Ortheris.")

We are far from liking London well enough till we like its defects the dense darkness of much of its winter, the soot on the chimney-pots and everywhere else, the early lamplight, the brown blur of the houses, the splashing of hansoms in Oxford Street or the Strand on December afternoons.

Henry James.

I risk the declaration that the London season brings together year by year an unequalled collection of handsome persons. Henry James.

LONDON AND THE ARTIST

And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master-her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.

J. M'Neill Whistler.

Walpole's View

THINK

HINK what London would be, if the chief houses were in it, as in the cities in other countries, and not dispersed like great rarity-plums in a vast pudding of country. Well, it is a tolerable place as it is! Were I a physician, I would prescribe nothing but recipe ccclxv drachm. Londin. Would you know why I like London so much? Why, if the world must consist of so many fools as it does, I choose to take them in the gross, and not made in separate pills, as they are prepared in the country. Besides, there is no being alone but in a metropolis: the worst place in the world to find solitude is the country questions grow there, and that unpleasant Christian commodity, neighbours.

I am more convinced every day, that there is not only no knowledge of the world out of a great city, but no decency, no practicable society-I had almost said not a virtue.

I revive after being in London an hour, like a member of Parliament's wife.

I am persuaded that it is the dampness of this

climate that gives me so much gout; and London, from the number of fires and inhabitants, must be the driest spot in the nation.

Though London increases every day, and Mr. Herschel has just discovered a new square or circus somewhere by the New Road in the Via Lactea, where the cows used to be fed, I believe you will think the town cannot hold all its inhabitants; so prodigiously the population is augmented. I have been twice going to stop my coach in Piccadilly (and the same has happened to Lady Aylesbury), thinking there was a mob; and it was only nymphs and swains sauntering or trudging. T'other morning, i.e. at two o'clock, I went to see Mrs. Garrick and Miss Hannah More at the Adelphi, and was stopped five times before I reached Northumberland House; for the tides of coaches, chariots, curricles, phaetons, &c., are endless. Indeed, the town is so extended, that the breed of chairs is almost lost; for Hercules and Atlas could not carry anybody from one end of this enormous capital to the other. How magnified would be the error of the young woman at St. Helena, who, some years ago, said to a captain of an Indiaman, "I suppose London is very empty when the India ships come out."

Horace Walpole.

Bloomsbury o

FOR

OR me, for me, these old retreats
Amid the world of London streets!
My eye is pleased with all it meets
In Bloomsbury.

I know how prim is Bedford Park,
At Highgate oft I've heard the lark,
Not these can lure me from my ark
In Bloomsbury.

I know how green is Peckham Rye,
And Syd❜nham, flashing in the sky,
But did I dwell there I should sigh
For Bloomsbury.

I know where Maida Vale receives
The night dews on her summer leaves,
Not less my settled spirit cleaves

To Bloomsbury.

Some love the Chelsea river gales,
And the slow barges' ruddy sails,
And these I'll woo when glamour fails
In Bloomsbury.

Enough for me in yonder square
To see the perky sparrows pair,

Or long laburnum gild the air

In Bloomsbury.