Emily Constance Baird Cook

“ The ever-changing sky is a continual wonder. A while ago the sun, like a disc of melting cream, disappeared in yellowish mists, scattering reflections like dirty snow. Now, through a clearing, he appears like the altar-glory of a Jesuit church; raining waves of golden light; the surrounding cloud-flocks are in a moment tinged with brilliance. And again, he is suddenly eclipsed; all returns to dulness and gloom: it might be the sad dawn of a rainy day."
It is, above all, this vast and eternally busy "Pool of London" that is, and ever has been, the key to her greatness, her wealth, her power. ”

“ Henry VIIth's beautiful chapel behind it, have, after the crude monuments of the Nave, all the calm of a secluded byway after the clamour of a noisy street.
Westminster Abbey is full of beautiful pictures. On a sunny day, especially, the play of light and shade on its pillars, the fretted tracery of its interlaced arches, the fine harmony of its proportions, the golden, mellowing, subdued light that enters through its "rose" windows, the colour of its many tombs and rich marbles, that, on a day of London winter, so beautifully harmonises with the whole, may well tempt many an artist. ”

“ What book has ever been written, nay, has ever attempted to be written, about the general architecture of London? The largest city in the world,—the metropolis of many cities in one city,—the aggregate of a hundred towns, each as big as Oxford, as Cambridge, as Winchester,—why should its stones be thus (p. 448) neglected? And, except for a sprinkling of traditional gibes, an annual dole of scornful references, what attention does the architecture of London receive from its inhabitants? or, indeed, from outsiders? Every one, on the contrary, considers himself at liberty to fling a stone at it. ”

“ In "this northern island, sundered once from all the human (p. 2) race," has for centuries been lit one of the torches that have illumined humanity. Not even Imperial Rome shone with such a lustre; not even the Cæsars in all their purple ruled over such a mighty, such an all-embracing empire.
The history of this mighty empire is bound up with the history of London. For, the history of London is that of England; it was the river, our "Father Thames"—her first and most important highway, a "highway of the nations,"—that brought her from the beginning all her fame and all her glory. ”

“ Such are the "byways of fiction" in London! Next to Dickens, in whose persuasive company we have wandered from Fact to Fiction, Dr. Johnson is, perhaps, of all our great Londoners, the most prominent. To him, indeed, the everlasting noise and bustle of the capital, "the roaring of the loom of time," was ever dear. Sayings of his about London have, in many cases, almost passed into household words: "He who is tired of London is tired of existence"; "Sir, let us take a walk into Fleet Street"; "I think the full tide of existence is at Charing Cross." ”

“ That Londoners are great lovers of the picturesque may be seen from the admiring crowd that surround the pavement artist; they prefer Nature, however, brought "home" to them in crude and garish colours. Yet, as likely as not, when the shabby pastellist has put away chalks and duster for the day, and betaken himself to his nightly refuge in Soho or Hatton Garden, the sky behind him will robe itself in intense hues of orange, purple, and crimson that baffle imitation, and before which even pavement-art fades into insignificance. For the sunset-skies of London are a marvel. ”

“ London Bridge is the terminus for big ships; from its parapet is seen, as far as the misty Tower Bridge, a vast city of masts, sails, and wharves. Big steamers often make this their starting-point for excursions, and sails of Venetian colour charm the eye. In cold winters the sea-gulls, flying hither in myriads from the icy North Seas, come to the Londoner's call, sure of food and welcome, filling grey sky and silvery river with an ever-changing constellation of white wings; "a blaze of comet splendour." Wild birds, like children, know their friends. ”

“ For this is, so to speak, one of the main doorways of the immense ant-heap; like ants, too, people seem to swarm incessantly, to go and come, in inconsequent but feverishly active sequence. Here is a blaze of light, a perpetual throng of "London's gondola," the hansom-cab, a confused medley of many sounds, that ceases not, but fades only after midnight; when the "heart of London," that never sleeps, subsides in the early hours of the morning into a dulled and general hum.
At Piccadilly, the foreign element from Leicester Square and Soho meets the native one. ”

“ If the West End takes its pleasure by driving in the Park, the East, on the other hand, finds its relaxation on the tops of 'buses and trams, in walking about the flaring, gas-jetted street, in looking into shop windows, or in driving about in all the pride of a private, special coster's cart. If the rich do not know how the poor live, the poor, on the other hand, have but a hazy idea of how the rich live. If you asked the average slum-dweller how the rich spend their day, they would most likely say, "in drinking champagne and driving in motor cars." ”

“ As she slinks along the outer railings of the Clifford's Inn enclosure, and across the irregular cobble-stones of the court, one notices that what is by courtesy termed a "garden" is merely a cat walk. It is a railed-in garden of desolation, its turf long ago forgotten, its gravel-paths even obliterated, a dingy strip of earth under a few mangy trees. Surely, nobody can have entered that rusty gate for at least a hundred years! It might be the garden of the "Sleeping Beauty," or at least a London edition of that lady. Poor, deserted closes! bits of vanishing London! ”

“ Shops are full; barrows of all kinds drive a brisk trade; velvet-cushioned trams ply up and down the big highway, which extends, apparently almost into infinity, up the long Mile End Road. (Tram-lines, in London, seem more or less confined to the uninspiring North and East and their suburbs.) Ugly and uninvigorating enough by day, the streets, by night, invest themselves with mysterious glamour and brightness. Like some murky theatre when the deceiving footlights are lit, this, too, is a "stage illusion," and it is a wise one. ”

“ Rising actresses have, as a rule, but one ambition—to act in London, to charm London audiences. Better, some think, a three-line part at the Lyceum than a "juvenile lead" at Leamington; better twenty weeks of the Criterion than a cycle of the Counties; better a curtain-raiser in the Haymarket than Shakespeare's Rosalind at Darlington or Preston. Hence the cruel and heart-rending "struggle-for-life" among young actresses in this big city of London; hence the weeks of slow starvation in Bloomsbury lodgings or Soho garrets, waiting for work that never comes. ”

“ A Londoner's house is the shell that hides him from the world; our houses are, to the foreigner, as enigmatic and as exclusive as we ourselves. But, once past the magic gateway, once past the Cerberus at the door, you come upon an interior often unguessed and undreamed of. The contrast is striking. What can be more dully monotonous, (p. 359) more unromantic, than the row of brick and stucco house-fronts that face the average large square or street? Yet it is ten to one that, inside, hardly one of these will exactly resemble the other, either in taste, architecture, or even general plan. ”

“ Some people say, by the way, that the present love of terra-cotta as building material, partly arises from the fact that it can be washed. If this be true, then it only shows that the Londoner of to-day is wanting in appreciation of the before-mentioned "artistic value" of soot. It may be, that, like the tailless fox of the fable, we admire what we must perforce put up with, or what we are accustomed to. Yet, it has always seemed to me that London's chief beauty lies in this all-pervading grime, mellowing, softening, harmonizing. ”

“ The peculiar and somewhat old-world charm of Bloomsbury is, like that of Chelsea, only made known to her devotees. To the visitor to London, no less than to the fashionable dweller in the West-End, it is a grimy, sordid, squalid region, where slums abound, where "no nice people live," and where mere "going out to dinner" necessitates either the paying of a half-crown cab fare, or the sacrifice of an hour in the bone-shaking omnibus. Hence arises the custom of saying that "Bloomsbury is so far away." ”

“ In London streets, the unexpected is always happening; thus, through the hideous plate glass of a bar parlour, you may catch glimpses of waving trees and grey towers, and even the dreadful glare of London advertisement hoardings does not "wholly abolish or destroy" the ancient charm of the crowded, irregular City streets. A City of parallel lines and squares, such as the Colonials love! Perish the thought! Let them widen Southampton Row if they will, remove Holywell Street and King Street if they list; but let us at any rate keep to our old and devious ways through the heart of the City! ”

“ It repeats the apparent determination of ages that there shall be no external architectural beauty in London. Height, breadth, massiveness of portal, all declare that he who resides here has not dispensed with architecture because he could not command it. In other climes this gentleman is dwelling behind carved porticoes of marble and pillars of porphyry; but here the cloud and sky have commanded him to build a blank fortress and find his marble and porphyry inside of it. Pass through this heavy doorway, and in an instant every fair clime surrounds you, every region lavishes its sentiment ”

“ Some of the Bloomsbury and Bayswater boarding-houses afford sad evidence of retrenched fortunes and squalid lives. The ragged window blind, the dirty tablecloth, covered always with remains of meals; the sad, lined, discontented faces pressed close to the dingy panes, the eternal smell of onions or fried fish, the general wretchedness and frowsiness of everything—all tell tales of a sadder kind than those of Dickens's Mrs. Tibbs or Mrs. Todgers. And, descending yet lower in the social scale, individual cases become yet sadder. I once lived in a London square, next door to an empty house. ”

“ Academy pupils study "the antique." The contrast is picturesque as well as strange. Does one not sometimes, as twilight falls, seem to hear the ghostly "swish" of the court beauties' dresses along a deserted British Museum Gallery, or seem to see in a stone Venus, with uplifted arm, an insufficiently clad fair lady of the olden time? It is but fancy, yet such is the charm of history and of historic association.
Ghosts of our own fancy may, and do, wander at their will in London's misty galleries; but ghosts, better authenticated, are popularly supposed to haunt a few of London's old houses. ”

“ All is given to us, unsparingly. For us and for the enrichment of the walls of our National Gallery, did the rude barbarians, in the sack of Italian cities, stay the hand of destruction; for us the treasures of art were wrested from many a palace of antiquity; it was for the delight of thousands of modern Londoners that the monasteries of the Middle Ages were plundered. Altar-pieces painted for adoration in the private chapel of some patron saint are now seen dimly, through London fog and smoke, hanging, maybe, next to some pagan Bacchus and Ariadne, or Venus and the Loves. ”

“ All this quarter of London is a vast hive of industry. The stranger should walk along the busy thoroughfare of Upper and Lower Thames Street all the way from the Tower to St. Paul's; tall, blackened, ever-devouring warehouses line the street, which is a very inferno of bustle and labour. Though the street is muddy and noisy, and its perambulation may not impossibly render the pedestrian more than a little cross, he will, at any rate, gain from it some insight into London life. ”

“ There is, I believe, a society for the cultivation of "window-gardening" among the poor, a society that gives prizes to the best results; the movement is a good one, and really deserves encouragement. To beautify the dull and often ugly lives of the London poor,—what society could have a much worthier aim? How many a hideous slum—some "Rosemary Lane," or "Hawthorn Lane,"—has been redeemed from utter gloom by some sprig of greenery, some frond of sickly fern, some crippled and stunted plant brought there, at some time, by some good angel of the poor? ”

“ Much is said from time to time about the ugliness of London street architecture ... the miles and miles of yellow-gray and sooty brick houses, each as much like the other as if so many miles of hollow block were chopped at regular intervals. And yet there is something so pleasant to think of in these interminable rows of brick blocks, that they are not altogether unpleasant to the eye. For they are houses of good size, comfortable houses; and their sameness, only noticeable through their vast number, means that the average of well-to-do-people in London is also vast. ”