Londoner

“ I do firmly believe that the Londoner is as contented with his city home as the dweller in the fairest valley among the Appennines; and that habit brings its usual indifference as to place. ”

“ The Londoner, too, may have been of that wealthy city connection who lived gorgeously, and, as we know, not merely entertained the higher nobility and men of wit and fashion, but were often welcomed guests at the tables of the great. ”

“ The curious indifference to other people's affairs that, as already mentioned, characterises the Londoner,—shows itself also in a certain want of public spirit. There is, naturally, very little of the proud, local, personal feeling that the villager and the small townsman so often feels. ”

“ There grows in the North Country a certain kind of youth of whom it may be said that he is born to be a Londoner. ”

“ Londoners have no definiteness of any sort. Their most striking trait is, paradoxically, a vague uncertainty, and this is seen in everything connected with London, from the weather to the gauzy, undecided, wavering scarfs which the women universally wear. ”

“ I have named a few of our great Londoners; yet they, indeed, are but few among the vast galaxy of the bright particular stars who, even in our day, still enlighten with their spirit their former dwellings and surroundings. It is their human interest that so transfigures London stones ”

“ 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. ”

“ But if they love London, as Londoners do love their native city, if they are strong, ‘in the swim,’ ‘smart,’ or whatever is the proper designation for those who are really given over to society, let them stay where they are. ”

“ London is the cruellest town in Europe. For sheer cold blood and heartlessness give Londoners the palm. I had connections enough for the first month or so, and then people found out things that didn't concern them. ”

“ And one never so keenly realizes that this is not true as when he watches the creeds and character of society in New York. Of Londoners we are apt to assert that they grovel obsequiously before their prince, with his attendant throng of dukes, earls, and minor gentlemen. This may be fact, but it is very far from being the whole fact. In London there is a large class of ladies and gentlemen who form a localized and centralized body, and whose assemblages are haunts of intelligence, refinement, and good taste. ”

“ Even on the intellectual side there are no great Londoners. It is well known that a number of eminent men have been born in London; but, in the course of a somewhat elaborate study of the origins of British men of genius, I have not been able to find that any were genuinely Londoners by descent. ”

“ The city of London hath given an example which, I doubt not, will be followed by the whole kingdom. The noble spirit of the metropolis is the life-blood of the state, collected at the heart; from that point it circulates, with health and vigour, through every artery of the constitution.... The city of London have expressed their sentiments with freedom and firmness; they have spoken truth boldly; and in whatever light their remonstrance may be represented by courtiers, I defy the most subtle lawyer in this country to point out a single instance in which they have exceeded the truth. ”

“ It pleased my uncle extremely to find I had never seen London before. He took possession of the metropolis forthwith. "London, George," he said, "takes a lot of understanding. It's a great place. Immense. The richest town in the world, the biggest port, the greatest manufacturing town, the Imperial city—the centre of civilization, the heart of the world! See those sandwich men down there! That third one's hat! Fair treat! You don't see poverty like that in Wimblehurst, George! And many of them high Oxford honour men too. ”

“ All London had indeed been present. Half the aristocracy of England, and far more than half the aristocracy of the London stage! The entire preciosity of the metropolis! Journalists with influence enough to plunge the whole of Europe into war! In one short hour Edward Henry's right hand (peeping out from the superb fur coat which he had had the wit to buy) had made the acquaintance of scores upon scores of the most celebrated right hands in Britain. ”

“ 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 balloon is passing over London, a London vastly changed from the London of 1900. Somehow it wears a countrified aspect, for every street has its double row of shady trees, and gardens and parks abound at every turn. This London, unlike its predecessor, is not smoke-begrimed, nor can it boast of dirty courts and filthy alleys like the London of 1900. Every house, great and small, bears the aspect of cleanliness and comfort, for poverty and misery are things no longer known. ”

“ I do not mean the walk par distinction; for I am writing of the picturesque, not the social pleasures of London:—no; go among the old trees, whose depths of shade are as little known as the depths of the Black Forest. The fine old branches will close over your head; the caw of the rooks is heard in melancholy but musical monotony; while their flight ever and anon disturbs the quiet leaves, and lets in fantastic streaks of sunshine on the soft grass. From afar off comes the perpetual and deep voice of the huge city,—that human ocean, whose waves know not rest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ So they had loved the country and hated London, and had never been so surprised in their lives as when they were duly presented and launched in society to find that London was the most amusing place in the world and that all the pains and drudgery to which they had been put there had prepared them for the enjoyment of the manifold interests and pleasures that came in their way. ”

“ London has nearly four millions of inhabitants—more than the six States of New England put together! It is the monstrous growth of our modern civilization. 41 With its enormous size, it contains more wealth than any city in the world, and more poverty—more luxury on the one hand, and more misery on the other. To those who have explored the low life of London, the revelations are terrific. The wretchedness, the filth, the squalor, the physical pollution and moral degradation in which vast numbers live, is absolutely appalling. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Have brought my girl to spend the day,
So to your hill my fathers came
And, sure, my son will do the same.
...
What sights there are, for those who know,
In every part of this great city!
Our men are mixed, it’s true, but oh,
Are not our London maidens pretty?
Look! you may see them everywhere—
Laughing in ball-rooms in Mayfair,
At tea at Ranelagh, or walking
On Sunday in Hyde Park and talking
The latest nonsense! What a sight,
In frocks adorable and costly!
At Epping too (East-enders mostly)
You’ll see good London girls at play ”

“ A freeman of London has the privilege of disturbing a whole street for an hour together with the twankling of a brass kettle or a frying-pan. The watchman’s thump at midnight startles us in our beds, as much as the breaking in of a thief. ”

“ Finding myself in the great city of London, I was likely to be in greater distress than when in the vast forest of Lithuania; for in London the whole population live in an atmosphere of snares, suspicion, and mistrust, every man viewing his neighbour as one who has a design upon him. ”

“ I must say I was very glad to come back to old London, unromantic as it is, with its busy shops and markets, its huge and unshapely omnibusses, clattering over stony streets, and its thousand haunts of business or pleasure,—such as you will seek for in vain in any other town in the world. Associations exercise a great influence over the human mind, and I could not look on the very streets and houses of old London without feeling a strange sort of pleasure, such as one feels on meeting an old acquaintance after a long absence. ”

“ And if London bores are as lions with drawn teeth and clipped claws, London pleasant people on the other hand are beyond any doubt the pleasantest in the world; more true and kind and less eaten up by vanity and egotism than Parisians, and twice as agile-minded as the very cleverest German. Again, a great delight of London is that wealth is of so much less social weight there than anywhere else. ”

“ Every town cherishes the sacred memory of its own particular great man, but London bears in its bosom intimate and familiar tokens of them all. The city and its neighbourhood for miles round are marked with historic and literary associations. The [67] place is all composed of great men's fame and chapters of world-history. London Clay is made of London's Pride, and London Pride grows in the London Clay.
Not a quarter, not a suburb is free of hallowed associations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Walk about the streets of London with an observant eye, and amongst other strange sights you will notice many persons who pass you by with so abstracted an air that you feel sure that though their bodies are in London their souls are out of town. They are smiling fantastically—they are making strange gestures—they are muttering to themselves—their minds are far indeed from the turmoil of cabs, and omnibuses, and jostling people amongst whom they are making their way. ”

“ Whether we consider London as the metropolis of a great and mighty empire, upon the dominions of whose sovereign the sun never sets, or as the home of more than three millions of people, and the richest city in the world to boot, it must ever be a place which strangers wish to visit. In these days of railways and steamers, the toil and cost of reaching it are, comparatively speaking, small ”

“ The picture of life in London, of its manifold pitfalls of temptation and corruption, which are here presented to the reader’s eye, is truly appalling. No one can rise from it without a deep conviction that something must be done, ay, and that soon, if the metropolis of the British Empire is not to become a modern Sodom and Gomorrah.”—John Bull. ”