London

“ And some of this is true of London, not only in its squares, parks, and gardens, gay with trees and flowering shrubs, but along the Great Embankment, where the stone-and-iron monsters wade knee-deep in the Thames, their broad backs freighted with countless multitudes. ”

“ So when I ask myself why I love London I realize that I appreciate that ancient memory which is London—a thing very like family tradition for which we in our turn are responsible to posterity—and I realize that I am every day of my life thrilled, puzzled, charmed, and amused by that flood-tide of common humanity flowing through London as it has surged through every great city in the history of civilization. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The time is coming—is already come, when, as most intelligent men turn over the pages of the world's history, they award the palm of the noblest civilization to London, a city full of merchants and artisans, rather than to Rome, a city full of soldiers, flushed with the pride of victory, and drunk with the blood of the slain. ”

“ Where is London, that somber city of smoke and drifting darkness, full of the deep roar and haunting music of disorder, with its oily, shining, mud-rimmed, barge-crowded river, its black pinnacles, and blackened dome, its sad wildernesses of smut-grayed houses, its myriads of draggled prostitutes, its millions of hurrying clerks? ”

“ The busy life, the shopping crowds, the street throngs, and the heavy streams of trade that flow through the highways of London, prove that London still is a great city—the greatest city in the world: and even the war, black and dread and horrible as it is, cannot overcome London, entirely. ”

“ The sight of London to my exil'd eyes Is as Elysium to a new-come soul: Not that I love the city or the men, But that it harbours him I hold so dear,— The king, upon whose bosom let me lie, And with the world be still at enmity. ”

“ For me, three of the loveliest and most strangely touching sights of London are the stars shining very high in the blue and very quietly when you look up at them from the roaring depths of a crowded, naphtha-flaring, poverty-stricken market street; a sunrise brightening over the Thames below London Bridge, while the barges are still asleep with the gleam of [Pg 25] their lamps showing pale in the dawn; and the blurred lights and ghostly buildings of a long city road that is clothed in mystery and transfigured by a brooding, dream-haunted fog. ”

“ I stand on the edge of a vast pit in which, down through successive strata—brick, tiles, black earth, powdered cement—lies the clay on which London rests. It is a deep, dark hole. It is as if some surgeon, operating on the great body of the city, has bared it to the spine. ”

“ When Londoners say ‘London,’ they mean Piccadilly, Selfridges, Covent Garden, that sort of thing, and that is not London. London is Tottenham and Chiswick, the ‘Paragon,’ Mile End, Walker’s Court and what it sells, and the black doss places under the railway arches. London is Houndsditch, where everybody looks bad, and Cornwall Gardens where everybody looks good. London is a congress-house of emotions. ”

“ Sitting on the banks of the Thames, a short railway journey from the narrowest portion of the channel and thus, of all the large towns, most near to the Continent, London is the most efficient mediatrix and exchanger of news between the Continent and England and the Continent and America. As capital of England, of a country which has always carried the mails of all the nations and parts of the world to all the nations and parts of the world, London is the great political, mercantile, and scientific storehouse of the world. No other periodical press can boast of such favourable circumstances ”

“ Along the main thoroughfares of London, from the West to the East, from the North to the South, there is never the intense loneliness of the streets that lie off the track. There the late Londoner and early Londoner divide the night between them, and as the late brougham or cab bears the tired pleasure-seeker home to rest, the carts and the wagons begin to wend their way to the markets and the docks and the great railway stations. ”

“ Nothing else in London is so like the effect of a spell, as to pass under one of these archways, and find yourself transported from the jumble, rush, tumult, uproar, as of an age of week-days condensed into the present hour, into what seems an eternal Sabbath. ”

“ No stranger can say that he has seen the vastness of London until he has mounted the hundreds of steps which lead to the Golden Gallery, and looked out upon the outstretched city and suburbs below. It is a sight never to be forgotten; the passengers underneath scarcely appear a foot high, and the omnibuses so diminished, that you fancy you could take one under your arm and walk off with it easily. But it is the immense range of country which the eye commands that astonishes the stranger. ”

“ Paul’s is the great landmark of London. Long before the eye of the approaching stranger obtains a glimpse of the graceful spires, grey massy towers, and tall columns which ascend from every corner of the outstretched city, it rests upon that mighty dome, which looms through the misty sky, like some dim world hanging amid the immensity of space ”

“ How strange and how unexpected, in the very heart of busy London, are these quiet old-world quadrangles, of calm, collegiate aspect, of infinite peace; a peace that seems perhaps more intense in contrast with the outside, just as the London "close" of greenery seems all the greener for its being set amid the surrounding grime, shining "like a star in blackest night." ”

“ London—the London of the 'sixties—noisy with hoofs and iron-bound wheels upon its cobbles and macadam, dark with slums that encroached upon its gayest ways, glittering with night-houses and pleasure gardens that focussed light till dawn, brightened as with clustered bubbles by the swelling skirts of ladies of the whole world and the half, was, though smaller, ignorant of electric light, and without half the broad spaces and great buildings of the London of to-day, still more sparkling and gayer in its effect because life was less hidden. ”

“ But in London the grand source of strife, Is of fortune to bear the command. Yet some who are high up to day, Acknowledged good sober and witty, May to-morrow be down in decay, In this great and magnanimous city. ”

“ The popular imagination has always presented the City of London as paved with gold; the popular tradition has always delighted to present the rise of the humble village boy from the poor apprentice to the rich merchant, Alderman, and Mayor. ”

“ How different from the London of the present day—from the splendid streets and shops which stretch from Temple-Bar to Whitechapel, and westward from those ancient City gates to a land of theatres, squares, and palace-like buildings—were the old narrow streets, with their high houses and overhanging gables, that rose tier above tier, their huge projecting signs, even at noon-day making a dim dreamy kind of twilight ”

“ Nowhere is success so sudden, so overwhelming, so blinding as it is in this vast city of London; and nowhere, alas! is that success so soon over, forgotten, eclipsed. The deity of one season is forsaken in the next; the Ruler-of-the-Universe must perforce return to his hovel, and, to say truth, he generally takes the change badly. London has a short memory. ”

“ NEWGATE. ROUND and within London lies a land chequered with lights and shadows, close city courts, and stifling suburban alleys, in which the sunshine only lingers for a few minutes during the day (where it seems imprisoned and in a hurry to escape above the dusky chimneys) ; and in this vast metropolis these scenes are contrasted with broad green, airy parks, and long lines of palace-like streets, which stretch westward and dip into the open and surrounding country. Its living crowds are ever in motion—now to witness a royal procession ”

“ When one looks at the map, particularly if it is on a large6 scale, London looks like a splash, rather longer than it is broad, with railway lines radiating in all directions, rather like a spider’s web, the centre being tenanted by whoever you like. And one thinks of Dick Whittington gaily treading in the spider’s web. But, in fact, one does not come out of the everywhere into the here of London. One melts into London, and one hardly knows how one comes to abandon the rest of the world. ”

“ In the most excellent situation of London the profound wisdom of our ancestors is very conspicuous and admirable. It is seated in a pleasant evergreen valley, upon a gentle rising bank in an excellent air, in a wholesome soil mixed with gravel and sand upon the famous navigable river Thames, at a place where it is cast into a crescent, that so each part of the City might enjoy the benefit of the river, and yet not be far distant one from the other ”

“ We return to the Strand and are once again caught up by the bustle and life of London—gay, careless, noisy, with every now and then a touch of something fiercer, something inexorable—as though one felt for a moment the iron hand of the great city—yet, nevertheless, full of that mixture of good-humor, animal spirits, and sentimentality that is so characteristic of London. ”

“ The history of London is the history of the British constitution and laws. There thicken round it most of the great political conflicts between kings and barons, and lords and commons; between feudalism and modern liberty; between the love of ancient institutions and the spirit of progress, from which, under God, have sprung our civil government and social order.
The history of London is the history of our religion, both in its corrupted and in its purified forms. Early was it a grand seat of Romish worship ”

“ For the fastidious elegancies of fashion, sprightliness of manners, sparkling discourse, and all the refinements of a consummate civilization, which are splendid substitutes for mere animal beauty, the ladies of Paris are unequalled;—but for female loveliness in all its glowing perfection—in all its most voluptuous expansion, London is the sovereign city that knows in this respect no rival. ”

“ But I am going to do it—I am going to know for myself what the real London and the real England are like. A thousand gentlemen in black clothes and silk hats, a thousand ladies with low-cut dresses and feathers in their hair—all thinking and talking about themselves and their own little affairs—that does not mean London. And a few large houses in the country, where these same people spend a few months riding after the hounds and shooting tame birds and wearying each other with idle, sleepy talk—that does not represent England. ”

“ We make our London, as we make our World, out of what attracts and interests ourselves. Few are they who behold in this vast metropolis a many-paged volume, abounding in instruction, offering to historian and philosopher, poet and antiquary, a luxuriant harvest and never-failing theme. ”

“ But I think I know, good and well, why a man might spend his whole vacation in London and enjoy every minute of it. For this old fogy, old foggy town of London is a man-sized town, and a man-run town; and it has a fascination of its own that is as much a part of it as London's grime is; or London's vastness and London's pettiness; or London's wealth and its stark poverty; or its atrocious suburbs; or its dirty, trade-fretted river; or its dismal back streets; or its still more dismal slums—or anything that is London's. ”

“ Paulus Jovius, in his description of the most remarkable towns of England, says, ‘All are obscured by London; which, in the estimation of many, is Cæsar’s City of the Trinobantes, the capital of all Britain, famous for the commerce of many nations; its houses are elegantly built, its churches fine, its towers strong, and its riches and abundance surprising. The wealth of the world is wafted to it by the Thames, swelled by the tide, and navigable to merchant ships, through a safe and deep channel for 60 miles, from its mouth to the City. ”

“ You cannot stir the ground of London anywhere but straightway it flowers into romance. Read the inscriptions on the crumbling tombs of our early merchant princes and adventurers in some of the old City churches, and it glimmers upon you that if ever the history of London’s commercial rise and progress gets adequately written it will read like a series of stories out of the Arabian Nights. ”

“ Strip London, mighty and majestic as it is, of the busy swarm of humanity that throng its streets, its suburbs, its temples, its public edifices, and its private dwellings, and how awful would be the walk of one solitary man throughout its noiseless thoroughfares. ”

“ In London, because it is the capital of the world, are the mysteries of many lands. London is a city of refuge for the outcasts of the Continent. It is an international Alsatia, where the laws from which the alien inhabitants have fled cease to run. There are quiet cafés and restaurants and clubs hidden away in back streets in which men and women meet and eat, drink, dance, and play cards according to their mood, and plot between whiles the deeds that will be ranked with the master crimes of the age. ”

“ London, the London before the war, flaunting its enormous glare, as of a monstrous conflagration up into the black sky—with its best Venice-like aspect of rainy evenings, the wet asphalted streets lying with the sheen of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great houses of the city towering all dark, like empty palaces, above the reflected lights of the glistening roadway. ”