Vanishing London

I HAVE been wondering lately if the time has not come for Macaulay’s New Zealander to pack up his sketchbook. Not that St. Paul’s is in ruins, — though the decorator and cleaner between them have made some people wish that it were. Nor has London Bridge been reduced to one broken arch, — on the contrary, builders are at work this very moment making it wider and more substantial than ever. But London itself is disappearing, and giving place to an entirely new town, at a rate that would be appalling if anybody stopped to bother about it. The astonishing tiling is, however, that nobody, or next to nobody, seems very much concerned. We all have a way of seeing the mote in our neighbor’s eye before being troubled by the beam in our own, and the Englishman, who is the first to reprove the vandalism of his neighbors, is the last to discover that his own London is vanishing as fast as those in charge of it can manage.

Of course, I know that London has been vanishing for some time past; to be accurate, ever since there was a London on the banks of the Thames. But the knowledge, useful as it may be to the antiquary or historian, does not help me to accept the change I must watch myself. It is extraordinary the sort of affection London inspires in all who have once set up their household gods in her midst. There are few who would not, with Charles Lamb, refuse to exchange her dirtiest, drab-frequented alley for Skiddaw or Helvellyn, who, with him, would not find an Arabian Night’s entertainment in her most ordinary sights. “ Oh, her lamps of a night, her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardwaremen, pastry cooks, St. Paul’s Churchyard, the Strand ! Exeter Change ! Charing Cross with the man upon a black horse ! ” One might think he was describing Samarcand, the Ineffable, instead of the dingiest district of dingy London. But London is, and ever has been, a land of enchantment to those who understand, and that is why the slightest suggestion of change is resented. And what change there has been since Charles Lamb’s time, — what change in my own ! I need only look back to the London I came to, now nineteen years ago, and compare it with the London I live in to-day, to realize the difference. Then, for instance, Oxford Street, on the north, was separated from the Strand, and Piccadilly, on the south, by a hopeless network of alleys, lanes, and courts, as I knew to my cost. For, like all Americans with small incomes — or, as in my case, no income at all — when they first came to London in those days, I had rooms in Bloomsbury, and every short cut southward led into the maze, where I kept losing my way with a persistency amounting to genius. Now, the stupidest stranger could not go astray, if she tried; two broad thoroughfares, Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, connect the two districts, running through what was once the labyrinthine heart of Soho and the squalid outskirts of Seven Dials. When I came, flats were still held in suspicion, the English having a talent for conservatism when it is to their disadvantage, and the mansions that now rise in tawdry red splendor everywhere from Chelsea to St. John’s Wood, from Hampstead to Clapham, only existed in the two gloomy gray rows inclosing Victoria Street. When I came, Bloomsbury was still Thackeray’s prim, respectable, correct Bloomsbury, —the Bloomsbury of Amelia and Becky Sharp and all their names imply, —though already a little down at the heel socially. Now, it is nothing but a tourists’ headquarters, big new hotels at every turn, the biggest profaning the sanctuary of Russell Square, where foolish brown stone copings deface the spacious plainness of the old house fronts ; while ’buses rumble through the once sleepy Places and Rows, and in the “ good old Tory brick-built streets ” shops are multiplying beyond belief. Street after street has widened out; angular crossings have rounded into circuses ; suburbs have stretched for miles and miles ; London is as little like the London I came to as that was like Thackeray’s !

But these and all the other innumerable changes I have not time to count were brought about gradually with some appearance of moderation. Only now and then, when I paused to think, did I find myself marveling at the new London springing into life all around me. To-day, it is another matter. London is plunged in a hideous debauch of pulling down and building up. If, as Lamb said, — and it is impossible in London not to quote Lamb, — London is a pantomime, then we have reached the great transformation scene. Only as things cannot go up quite as fast as they come down, there is one chaotic interval during which all the machinery is exposed to view, before a still newer London emerges, clean, spick, and span, and about as inspiring as transformation scenes, in their tinsel and gilt, are on the pantomime stage.

I do not exaggerate. For the moment, confusion is the order of the day, and one takes one’s walks abroad through a huge builder’s yard. Scaffolding is everywhere. Houses fall in rows. Bridges have gone or are going. The sound of the pickaxe fills the air, the dust of demolition is thick as the fog. Hoardings, flaring with posters, line the streets, until Sunny Jim, leaping a fence in praise of a patent food, has become as familiar a figure to the Londoner as Nelson on his monument.¹ Half Chelsea is down, because, I believe, the leases of a big estate have fallen in, and it is a convenient moment to save it from the reputation Carlyle gave it as 11 a singular heterogeneous kind of spot; ” half Kensington, “ the old Court Suburb,” is going the same way, for reasons no doubt as wise. Nothing is left of Buckingham Palace Road, for a great stretch on its southern side, except a dreary canal and a drearier, dirtier railway with trains steaming in and out of Victoria. Oxford Street, Piccadilly, Parliament, and almost every other street are disfigured by great empty gaps, every here and there between the houses, and as I write a new project is broached for the widening of Piccadilly. The little corner behind the Abbey and the Dean’s Yard, like a bit of a sleepy old cathedral town dropped down in the middle of London, is doomed; and when last I passed, half of Milbank Street had gone and half of Great College Street, with the paneled old houses that for two centuries had overlooked the peacefulness of the Abbey inclosure, — and what memories go with them ! The Mall, where ghosts in hoops and powder walk, is overrun in its upper end by workmen who will not pack up and depart until trees are laid low and a huge academic memorial to Queen Victoria has banished the ghosts forever. A scheme is on foot for a renovated, incongruous Trafalgar Square laid out with flower beds. The question of money alone, last year, saved Adelphi Terrace, the most complete example in London of Adam’s domestic architecture, from the County Council, who wanted the site for their Town Hall and hoped to “ square ” the artists who objected by a promise to design the new building in the Adam style ; it would be about as generous to offer to pull down Westminster Abbey and erect a modern theatre in pure Gothic ! As far as I know, nothing can save Covent Garden, which, though it may be “ dearer than the gardens of Alcinous ” and a pest to the publishers in the quarter, I always fancied as sacred an institution as the Bank of England. Christ’s Hospital,—the great School a part of London Town

— in whose courts Lamb and Coleridge once kicked and stretched their little yellow legs, and where, in consequence, the yellow legs of generations of obscure little boys have ever since been held in veneration, is now a thing of the past. The Inns of Court — “ with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges ” — share in the general desecration, and every day takes something from the charm of that tour of their quiet quadrangles and gardens, stretching almost uninterruptedly from the river to Gray’s Inn Road, upon which I loved to “personally conduct” my sight-seeing friend from home. Already old Middle Temple Lane is modernized, and Pendennis and Warrington, could they come back, would be strangers there, though Ruth Pinch’s fountain still splashes with Dickens’s sentiment close by. Only yesterday, the wonderful wood carvings, Grinling Gibbons’s in all probability, and the glory of Clifford’s Inn, were sold, the Inn itself depending for survival on the whims of a new proprietor. To-morrow, the seclusion of Gray’s Inn will be violated, and the high wall that for centuries hid from the vulgar crowd the green with Milton’s tree — the green where Pepys, in his more gallant mood, went walking “ to observe the fashions of the ladies because of my wife making some clothes ” — is to be removed that, henceforth, through an open railing Tom, Dick, and Harry may pry in as they pass. And there is scarcely another of all the old Inns of Court or Chancery that does not also wear the marks of iniquitous progress. In that green bit of the Valley of the Thames Turner painted from Richmond Hill, gimcrack villas are spreading, and would have spread over it all but for a hard battle with the landlord and the jerry-builder, who — and I suppose they cannot be blamed for it — value higher rents and promising speculation above a beautiful view, no matter how many more Turners might want it for a picture. The battle still rages fiercely over Hampstead Heath, — Keats’s Heath and Constable’s, — and no one can yet say with whom will rest the victory. It was just the other day that Royalty, the King I believe, opened the modern structure that has replaced the old gray stone bridge of Kew, made beautiful in the beginning by the architect, and glorified by Time. But a new edition of Baedeker is needed to chronicle the change.

It is in the Strand, however, that matters have come to a crisis, for the “ancient Strand ” has simply passed away, and there is no street in London that could so ill be spared. That it w^as the most absurd street in the world, I would be the last to deny: the main thoroughfare to the richest, busiest quarter of the richest, busiest city that ever was, — part of the route that Heine in a rare grandiloquent moment called “ the world’s pyloric artery,” and yet as narrow and inconvenient a street as you could find anywhere, — “ the long, bare, lanky Strand ” of Henley’s memorable verse. If millions waited for a man at the Stock Exchange, or an important train at one of the big eastern stations, did he venture to reach either in cab or ’bus through the Strand, it was to fling his millions deliberately away, to make sure of his train going without him. It seemed a street made for no other end than to block the traffic just where the traffic could least afford to be blocked. And it was as shabby, as seedy, as if it ran through the slums; seedy houses and seedy shops lining it, and seedy people walking through it at all except the theatre hours of the day and night. But this very inconsistency gave it its charm. It was not so wonderfully old, really, I am not sure that it could not be called fairly young in a town where Watling Street begins — or ends. But it was, to use a word dear to the collector, unique. Fine broad avenues and spacious boulevards are common enough from New York to Rome, from Budapest to Paris. But a Strand in any other capital would be an impossibility. Then, even in its shabbiness, it was not without a chance picturesqueness; it had its points of view from which the irregular houses and capricious sky-line seemed designed for the benefit of the artist; the London smoke and dirt had lent it a magical mellow tone; and there were seasons and hours when the London atmosphere and the London light turned it into the golden Strand of Henley’s Voluntary. More than this. Even in its shabbiness, it had an irresistible fascination that I, for my part, would find it hard to define though I have felt it with the rest. Certainly if every one who knows London knows the Strand, every one who loves London loves the Strand. And so it has always been, from the days when Pepys went floundering through its mud, when Dr. Johnson watched the “ tide of human existence ” ebbing and flowing toward Charing Cross, when Charles Lamb shed tears “ in the motley Strand from fulness of joy ; ” down to the more immediate days when Tennyson could never come to London without visiting the Strand, there to listen to “ streaming London’s central roar,” when Henley discovered in it his El Dorado, when Mr. Henry James made it the scene of his first walk to celebrate his return to London.

But of a Strand transformed into a fine wide avenue no more typical of London than of any other big capital or town, where will be the attraction ? It is true that in detail, like London itself, it has ever been changing. I live close by in a house where Pepys once lived, and if I look out of my windows, I see, not the palaces that he would remember, stretching in a stately row between Strand and river: —

but the biggest of the big modern hotels built for the tourist. Italian Restaurants and American Quick Lunch Counters are more common than the taverns where Dr. Johnson drank his port and proclaimed in the platitudes that would have bored to death any man less patient than Boswell. I doubt if there survives a single shop or any of the things that “ fed ” Lamb, without the power of satiating him. But, in its main outlines, its main absurdities, its main characteristics, the Strand throughout the centuries has scarcely varied. Until ten years or so ago, Lamb or Dr. Johnson, or even Pepys, might have recognized it for the Strand, even as they searched in vain for once familiar landmarks. Now, however, the old limits, the old constructive lines have been or are being abandoned, and this makes all the difference. The two churches are not to be touched, though their dead have been carted away : St. Clement Danes — “ Clement’s angular and cold and staid,” one of Wren’s fifty triumphs, and St. Mary-le-Strand, — Pope’s church, that “ collects the saints of Drury Lane,” and that proves Gibbs, its architect, a worthy follower of Wren, and not the “mere plodding mechanic” Walpole declared him. But the street itself has been gradually widening on either side. Every excuse to add to its width has been taken advantage of. Already, in front of the Hotel Cecil, the line of frontage has been set back and the space thus gained thrown into the roadway; already in crossing Wellington Street it presents signs of a coming circus or open circular place. And now to the north, between Wellington Street and St. Clement’s, it is all down, and the work so far carried toward completion that roadway and pavement have here assumed their new and — for our day at any rate — final proportions.

The worst of it is that this stretch of the Strand, in disappearing, has carried with it a whole district, — and a district no less interesting than itself. When, from the top of a ’bus, you look over the hoardings where Sunny Jim forever leaps, it is to a very abomination of desolation. A deserted city in the West, you would say, or another Pompeii. To me this waste of broken walls and dirtheaps and empty spaces in the very centre of London is such an astounding sight, that I wonder how the crowd, to whom a fallen horse or a man laying a gas pipe is an object of inexhaustible curiosity, can pass by with apparent unconcern, No one seems to mind if, in the general ruin, streets and corners that never will, that never can, be built up as they were before, have perished. The only emotion the spectacle of destruction has aroused is antiquarian, a cold emotion at the best; the only reason for interest, the scholar’s supposition that here was once the Danish Settlement, the village of Ealdwic, or Aldwic. But — it may be my misfortune — possibilities so remote fail to excite me. Alfred, who, the learned treatises say, did great things here, is to me but a lay figure — a very dull one — of my old school history books, while the Danish Kings, whose burial place, it is suggested, gave the name of “ Danes ” to St. Clement’s, fade into pale phantoms by the side of Dr. Johnson, kneeling in ponderous prayer in the church itself. Perhaps it is because I first read my Boswell in an old illustrated edition, in which there was a picture of the great man at St. Clement’s, — Boswell at his side, their two cocked hats hanging on two pegs in front of the pew, the occasion, the special Good Friday when Boswell had breakfasted with him on tea and cross buns, — that there seems to me room in the church for no other associations. The pedant, however, has a way of preferring periods and people nothing is known about, that are therefore a convenient peg to hang his theories on. He goes hunting after shadows when the substance is under his nose, and so it is inevitable that he should welcome the name Aldwych, given to one of the new thoroughfares through the old quarter, as if it had never occurred to him that Wych Street was as appropriate a tribute to the Danes, who I am not sure call for any tribute at all, and was, besides, picturesque with a picturesqueness that Aldwych cannot emulate, at least for us, or in our day. Wych and Holywell were almost the only old, narrow, twisting streets, with gables and overhanging stories, left in London. Both had a doubtful reputation, not entirely accounted for by the safe shelter they supplied to Jack Sheppard and his pals, or the asylum they offered later to the whiskey-drinking, bailiff-hunted journalist, who has now perished as completely as Jack Sheppard himself. But both were also the haunt of the booklover, the headquarters of the second-hand bookseller. Everybody who cared for books paid them periodic visits ; everybody who collected books turned over their penny and twopenny boxes, in hopes of finding another treasure like the famous cook book, bought for a song and sold for a fortune ; everybody who reviewed books took them there to sell to that infallible authority, Mrs.——, who scorned the title and the author’s name, and had only to look at the publisher’s mark to make her estimate. Gables and over-hanging stories, however, were no arguments with a County Council pledged to progress. Other demure little nooks have inherited the reputation, and the second-hand booksellers are exiles in the full glare of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, where it was even a question if the penny and twopenny boxes would be left at their doors, where they had been from time immemorial, or be cleared away in the general town-cleaning. New Inn, just beyond Wych and Holywell streets, has ceased to be a place of “ pleasant walks and gardens.” The near squalid labyrinth, consecrated though it was to Dickens, has shared the common fate.

And for what, I ask, for what this wholesale sacrifice of the past, this feverish massacre of the picturesque? Change — “the trick of Time, the old humorist” — is inevitable, I admit, or we should never have moved from our caves, or stopped painting ourselves blue. The authorities were not wholly without reason when they came to the conclusion that the Strand was too narrow, and that it was high time to make a direct line of communication between it and Holborn. That this had not been done long ago was one of the delightful absurdities of London. But easy transit and well-regulated traffic are not everything, even in a busy modern town, and none but the spendthrift would get rid of the old beauty in his possession unless he had some expectation of a new beauty to take its place. When Napoleon and Haussmann, between them, pulled down old Paris, at least they created on the ruins a stately new town of splendid vistas and noble proportions. When the authorities in London set to work to restore and rebuild, they produce masterpieces of mediocrity and meanness like Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, and it needs no power of second sight to foresee what manner of London will rise from the dust-heap. After sentence was passed upon the Strand, the London County Council revealed unexpected signs of a conscience, going so far as to invite ten distinguished — or prominent — architects to take part in a competition for the rebuilding of Central London. The ten architects accepted the invitation, made and submitted their plans, and were exceedingly well paid for their trouble. Then a gallery was rented and the designs were exhibited, so that rate-payers, who were footing the bill, could not complain they had had nothing for their money. To the ordinary mortal, however, the pleasure of looking at architectural elevations and perspectives must seem a poor return for the squandering of thousands. But this is all the rate-payers have so far got from the investment. No more has been heard of the competition, the architects and their plans, and now, a couple of years later, the County Council knows its own mind in the matter less than ever. Beyond finishing off the new street magnificently, with a “ pub ” at one end and a superior sort of music hall at the other, it has no definite scheme, but, shifting the responsibility to the shoulders of an irresponsible public, is setting up, at renewed expense, red, green, black, and white signs as so many suggestions for the line of frontage of Aldwych, and is asking Londoners generally what they think. If the American were asked, he might say that this sort of reckless waste of public money would at home be called a job. But the Englishman, who never calls a spade a spade unless it is somebody else’s, writes to the papers instead, and the various signs represent the various views of Academicians, societies of Architects, and County Councilors themselves. What will come of it all is entirely a question of chance.²

But, after all, as a rule, it is to chance that London owes whatever architectural distinction she can boast. After the Great Fire, Wren would have rebuilt the city in the “ grand style,” anticipating Haussmann, but there was no Napoleon to back him. A few of his successors and theirs inherited, in a lesser degree, his ideas, and Regent Quadrant, Waterloo Place, the Adelphi, some of the Terraces about Regent’s Park are the result. But these are the exceptions. Chance, on the whole, has been more successful than the architect, and chance is now showing that the two Strand churches, so shut in of old, stand in a vast open space with a dignity and grace never suspected in them before; it is showing the Law Courts as a fine noble array of buildings, not merely a confused façade half seen from Fleet Street; it is showing that the city spires and towers group themselves into marvelously pictorial arrangements, hitherto invisible. But whether this new beauty, the gift of chance, be preserved, depends upon the color of the sign which appeals to a public blessed with probably less feeling for beauty and harmony than any public that ever existed. I do not want to play the prophet, but I am not hopeful.³

London vanishes from the convenience of the public, I am told, and the excuse is irreproachable. It is not, however, only the old streets, the old stones of London that are vanishing, but the old customs and habits, the old prejudices and preferences, the old ways and means, the old faiths and manners, — in a word, the old life. I begin to doubt whether the convenience of the public would have seemed such a burning problem, were it not for the sudden love of change that has swept over England like a whirlwind, uprooting the cherished traditions of centuries on its way. Tell me what a man wears, says Carlyle, tell me what a man eats, says Brillat-Savarin, and I will tell you what he is. Judged by these standards, the English have developed or deteriorated into a new race, a new people. I am not writing at random. Take the Englishwoman. At one time she had a reputation — and the comfort of having come by it rightfully — as the worst dressed woman in Europe or America, according to the law of fashion, the most practically dressed, according to the law of common sense. And now ? She observes the mode more scrupulously than the Parisian, and throws common sense to the winds, as if eager to make amends for the crimes of her ill-dressed past. I do not mean that she can as yet rival the Parisian ; it is not in her nature to ; but she devotes her energies to the attempt with such zeal that she rushes to the other extreme. Anticipating the hours and their obligations, she appears at high noon in gowns that, in the previous phase, she would have reserved for dinner. She shops in chiffon and muslin. She faces the winter’s cold in lace, and the summer’s deluge in slippers and open-work stockings. The most abominable climate in the world cannot check her ambition, nor the dirtiest town put a restraint upon her frivolity. There was a time when it was the American who was supposed to be the foolish one, indulging in a perpetual round of diamonds and silks. Now, if in Bond Street or Piccadilly, you see a useful tailor gown, neat linen skirt, stout, well-made boots, you may know the wearer for an American. The tables are turned, and it is the Englishwoman who must be held up as the model of extravagant inappropriateness. No one living in London can have failed to note the change, but as yet there is no Teufelsdröckh to chronicle it.

In the matter of food, the revolution has been still more radical. To tamper with the “ good old roast beef of England ” is to strike at the roots of the British Constitution, and it has been tampered with. Throughout the Provinces the joint may still hold its own, and chops and steaks, bacon and eggs be retained as its chief and only allies. No matter where the English cook is found, she may remain faithful to her one sauce, her plain boiled and roast. Indeed, now and then in London itself, I am invited to a dinner designed apparently to prove Darwin’s theory — it was Darwin’s, was n’t it ? — of the occasional revival of the superannuated type. But it will not be long before the English cook becomes as extinct a species as the dodo, and in London the joint is fast retreating before the coming of the casserole and the chafing-dish. Not in vain has the Delicatessen shop waved its sausage and Kraut in the face of the British public, not in vain has the charcutier spread his pâtés and galantines. The American sells his chowders in Piccadilly, the Italian his macaroni in Mayfair. And the foreign restaurant blossoms as the rose. At an end are the days when Kettner’s hid in the depths of Soho, fearful of being found out as the sole provider of the “ French Dinner.” Now it is the “ English Dinner ” that seems the indiscretion: joint and vegetables languish, Stilton and Cheddar wither and decay. Friday’s beefsteak pudding at the Cheshire Cheese has degenerated into a show for the tourist, along with the waxworks at Madame Tussaud’s, the crown jewels at the Tower. Even a stronghold of British conservatism like Simpson’s, the last temple of salmon, sirloin, and saddle unadorned, the last home of Thackeray’s Robert and Keene’s, — outstripped, alas, in the struggle for existence by that world-conqueror, the Swiss or Italian waiter, — even Simpson’s has fallen with the Strand. It will be set up again, they say, and once more will the salmon, the sirloin, and the saddle be wheeled about from guest to guest, nominally that each may choose his cut, actually that appetite may fail before the grossness of the spectacle. But will there be guests to come, will old clients be won back from the splendors of the Savoy, from the economies of the little eighteenpenny dinner of Soho, which they have been enjoying in the meanwhile? Nor does the choice of splendors and economies end with the Savoy and Soho. I often ask myself in astonishment whether this can really be the London where my husband and I, rebelling against the lodginghouse “meat-tea,” used to wander in hopeless search for a dinner that people of small means could eat without loss of self-respect, — the dinner served daily in every Continental capital. There was a time when London was pitiless to the man who, though poor, was misguided enough to prefer dining to feeding. But it is another matter now. From the Carlton to the Roche there are restaurants with menus to meet every income ; and, greatest change of all, dinner, once a private family rite with the Englishman, has become a public ceremonial, and, like the French Kings, he dines where all the world may see. No less curious, no less serious it may be, is the sudden multiplication of the bread shop. For the one confectioner, where stewed tea and poor port were the most tempting items on the bill of fare, there are now a dozen “ Afternoon Tea ” places, patronized by the idle who have nothing to do with the hours between the lunch they have eaten to the sound of music, and the dinner they mean to eat to the sound of music, except to drink tea to the sound of music ; — there are now a hundred A. B. C.’s, as they are called for some inexplicable reason, British Tea Tables, Cabins, Lyons’s, where the working, clerking youth of England gorge themselves 011 the cocoa and scones for which they have deserted the old midday chop and ale, until the new “ national physique ” they are developing, in place of the old stately triumph of “ British beef and beer,” has become a serious subject of study for the scientist, a newspaper sensation for the silly season.

But I would never have done if I endeavored to record all the changes of which I and my generation are the witness. Wherever I turn, it is the same. The British Matron has thrown off her home-staying talents with her cap. The British clerk has shown that when the thermometer is in the eighties, his business ability does not depend upon frock coat and top hat. The British Tommy Atkins swaggers in khaki and a Prussian cap. The British public has survived the scandal of a “ Continental Sunday,” with galleries and museums, as well as public houses, open, and bands playing in parks and gardens. The London smoke has been challenged, the London fog is under observation. It is enough that anything has always been as it is for some one to want to change it. Really, I am not sure that it was not the Clerk of the Weather who contrived the rains of last June and July in sheer weariness of the old fashion of occasional sunshine during the London summer.

What will come of it all, no one can say ! Some good perhaps, but that is not the question. In the new London, perfect in the eyes of the County Council, cosmopolitan in the dress, the food, and the life of the people, I would still sigh for the absurd old London of crooked streets and provincial ways. For a new, hygienic, clean, well - ordered London could be built any day, further up or down, on the banks of the Thames. But old London, as it was, can never be built again, and I cannot watch it go without a word, not of protest which would be useless, but of regret which is sincere.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell.

NOTE. I scarcely liad finished my lament over Vanishing London, when I felt it was time to be beginning’ a fresh one. For changes still follow one another so fast, it is impossible to keep pace with them. To-day, all London weeps over the threatened loss of her squares ; to-morrow, it will be for something else as serious. Before this paper is in print, its charge of vandalism will seem incomplete. But, after all, nothing would answer, were completeness my aim, but a daily paper for the record. Perhaps, however, I ought to explain that already, in the short time since my article was written, London seems to be waking from her apathy. That picture of her weeping over her green squares points to the difference. If she continues as sensitive, it will be, judging from present appearances, many a long day before her tears can, with reason, cease to flow.