Londoners

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now struggling through the heavy mud, now scrambling over the rocks, in places so steep that the men had to climb on to each other's shoulders in order to proceed, the Londoners rushed the Turkish positions, and following up their success hustled the enemy to such purpose that Es Salt was captured practically without opposition. But the advance did not stop here, for every moment was of value, and though they had now been marching and fighting for four days in unspeakable conditions, the infantry began their twenty-mile march to Amman. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A Londoner passes his life in learning the most adroit mode of threading a crowd, and escaping compulsory journeys in cabs and omnibuses; and dine with any man in that metropolis from twenty-five to sixty years of age, and he will entertain you, from the soup to the Curacoa, with his hair-breadth escapes and difficulties with cads and coach-drivers.
LONDON. A Londoner, if met abroad, answers very vaguely any questions you may be rash enough to put to him about “the city.” ”

“ Every one must have known that such an event as the visit of his majesty to the city of London must, from its rarity, collect thousands, if not myriads, to witness it; so that any accident to which the metropolis was exposed at present, from the collection of a large mass of people together, must have been as palpable a month ago as at the present moment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Moreover, London was not then the vast, overgrown, incoherent city which it has since become, and its inhabitants still took that personal interest in one another’s doings, and felt, to some extent at any rate, that sense of family sympathy which, though they are common traits of provincial town life, are characteristic of the metropolis no longer. ”

“ And so we trace in London, as in all other of our cities, an infinity of retail shops, of personal businesses, of minnows living in the whirlpool as best they can, of small parties foraging against poverty, of vedettes feeling the way for the Napoleonic hosts of commerce, until we climb to the room of the solitary worker, who has no master but the morrow for which he has not provided, and no subordinate but the yesterday which he has won from death. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ OF THE HONOUR OF THE CITIZENS
This city is ennobled by her men, graced by her arms, and peopled by a multitude of inhabitants; so that in the wars under King Stephen there went out to a muster, of armed horsemen, esteemed fit for war, twenty thousand, and of infantry sixty thousand. The citizens of London are respected and noted above all other citizens for the elegance of their manners, dress, table, and discourse. ”

“ It is better to be in London, and to be free, and to look up the pleasant people as you feel a thirst for their presence. Under ordinary circumstances nothing is duller, as far as society is concerned, than country life in England; and out of England it can scarcely be said to exist. Whatever they may be to the natives of the countries, foreign capitals are to English people but as watering-places,—delightful for a time, but in the long run poor substitutes for London during the season. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is the homesickness for London that extends the subscription list to the bounds of the empire; it is the desire to know what London thinks of itself, of the provinces, of the world, that makes readers for Punch in every land. ”

“ The truth is I am so fond of London that I can afford to abuse it—and London is on the whole such a fine thing that it can afford to be abused! It has all sorts of superior qualities, but it has also, and English life, generally, and the English character have, a certain number of great plump flourishing uglinesses and drearinesses which offer themselves irresistibly as pin-cushions to criticism and irony. The British mind is so totally un-ironical in relation to itself that this is a perpetual temptation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The growth of London to its present enormous size may readily be accounted for, when we reflect that for ages it has been the capital of England, and the seat of her court and legislature; that since the union with Scotland and Ireland, it has become a centre for those two countries; and that, being the resort of the nobility, landed gentry, and other families of opulence, it has drawn a vast increase of population to minister to the tastes and wants of those classes ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And they are worthy of the utmost respect, for they contain the ashes of some of the noblest citizens of London, some of its greatest benefactors and its hardest workers, those who have helped, stone by stone, to raise the great city to the height to which it has attained in its influence in the world. ”

“ No, sir; in London we see into, and see through, all sorts of pretension: the pretension of wealth or rank, whatever kind of quackery and imposture. When I say we, I speak of the vast multitudes forming the educated, discriminating, and thinking classes of London life. We pass on to what a man is, over who he is, and what he has ”

“ London is not only the center of business but of literary, artistic and political activity. Especially is this true for Americans. All of our history prior to 1776 is English, and in the annals of the world 1776 is only the day before yesterday. Our writers, as soon as they get their feet on the ground at home, look to London, this clearing-house of literature as of money. London writers, from the time of Shakespeare to Dickens, Thackeray and Kipling, are ours just as much as they are England’s. ”

“ Those who are born in London never fathom its depths, its influence, its strength, its significance, its import. 'Those who come to London young are cowed at first by its proportions, become familiar with half one district, and treat all other districts into which accident may drag them as pagan regions beyond the pale of the true civilisation. 'But I confront London for the first time in the mature years of youth, with book knowledge of all its wonders, and a feeling of brotherhood for it. Greater England is my father, but this London is my most beloved sister, of whom I am proud. ”

“ When an example was set, the whole fraternity, fired with emulation, thrust each new one beyond his neighbour. Such were the impediments to walking so recently as 1766! The reader may imagine how a Londoner must have felt during a high wind and shower; a thousand signs swinging on rusty hinges above him, threatening ruin to his person at every step, and a thousand spouts pouring cascades at his luckless head. ”