THE LURE OF LONDON.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 218, 14 September 1908, Page 6

THE LURE OF LONDON.

No ■ city in the world offers so many temptations to just "fool about," or wives to the pastime so much the air of an educational tonic. It knocks 10 per cent, off one's income simply to live within reach qi the inexhaustible variety .of the London streets. Nowhere can one persuade oneself so satisfactorily that a day spent in rummaging among old^bookstores, or in print-shops or old furniture and silver shops, is a day, profitably spent. • . ■ No one evar knows London. ■! nereis always something left for the newcomer to discover on his own account, and a plunge out of the main thoroughfares into a labyrinth of winding r.lleys and narrow, silent, seedy-look-ing streets is bound to yield somethin? to the investigator, be it an old tun with a wondrous cellar of port, or some unexpected church of historic memories, smothered away in a corner, or art old curio-shop with all the riches of Sheraton and Chip"pendale behind its unpromising irontage, or a Georgian mansion tucked" almost out of sight by upstart encroachments, or even, with luck, some relic of Roman London. But of the free attractions of London in May the Park comes easily first. It is astonishing how much of the social life of London centres round " it. Nothing else competes with it as the playground of the million or so Londoners who live to kiil time. Every morning between 10 and 12.30, every afternoon between four and seven, and every Sunday morning in the breathing-space between church and lunch, you may see in Hyde Park, between Stanhope Gate and the French Embassy, something, though not very much, of the wealth and beauty of London; something, too, though hero again not very much, of its society. The first fine morning brings out two or three hundred riders in the Itow, and two or three thousand people to promenade up and down, to sit on the chairs and look on, to meet and gossip. You take a book, you choose the shade of a tree, you have the scent of flowers all round 3'ou, and this constant stream of riders and promenaders in the immediate foreground—and all the affairs of the work-a-day world become instantly and delightfully remote. It is not, of course, a select gathering in any sense, but it is still fairly correct to say that "everybody " goes there. You may, that is, see. a veritable leader of society, a part of the real world, and within a yard of him or her somebody who looks like an escaped inmate from a Blobmsbury boarding-house^-and who probably is. But this gredt concourse, idling up and down or talking and laughing under the trees, a brilliant splash of colour against the sylvan setting of the Park, does make up a sight very well worth seeing, and an amusement very well worth taking part in, even for the seventy and seventh time. It carries with it an immense suggestion of leisure, easy elegance, and natural enjoyment.

The same general criticism may be passed on the afternoon show.' Nothing gives one such an. impression of the enormous wealth of London as ;the mile-long procession of motors and carriages between four and seven. It gains from the onlookers' point of

view by being restricted to private vehicles. The average, in consequence,, rules high, in vehicles, horseflesh, and ap r pomtments. You .will: see . N finer horses perhaps in Madrid.or Vienna, arid' a more glittering, faultlesslycorrect, and spick-and-span turnout in Central Park; but nowhere will Jem see-so many good carriages or so vast a gathering of sound horseflesh.