A Clever Colonial on London.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXIX, Issue XII, 20 September 1902, Page 716

A Clever Colonial on London.

No more true description of London has, the “Graphic” believes, ever been written than this, which “Clio” sends to the “Bulletin”: — London is certainly the most sootbegrimed, rosy-tinted, dirtiest, cleanest, poorest, most opulent, most flinty-hearted, most sympathetic, ugliest, most beautiful, most bewildering collection of mansions, hovels, and terrace-houses that this old world has ever seen. There “the sordid, great, squalid, magnificent, tragedy of human fate” is acted every day and all day long, like an American continuous vaudeville. Nobody has ever accurately described the monstrous city, and nobodv ever will describe it, for nobody ever sees London. There is no unit. London. There are a multi-million of little Londons, each projected from the brain or imaginative faculty of each and every beholder and observer of the mighty

wen. I myself have seen worse savagery in the West End than ever I saw in the South Pacific. I once saw a young man so ragged that he made me turn away—his nakedness shone through his tatters, and white nakedness, is so very much more marked than brown or black nakedness; he was in College-street, Westminster, right close up to Parliament Houses. But then I also saw the Thames in summer-afternoon light. “Earth has not anything to show more fair.” That’s the worst of London. You ean’t take an impartial, unbiassed view. You begin to get sentimental at once. You try to get the view from Westminster Bridge, of course; that persistent sonnet comes into your mind. You are .in City-road, your heart sunk to your very boot soles at the grimy everydayness of it, when suddenly the recollection flashes that Wilkins Micawber's address was Windsor terrace, City-road. You pick out his house and straight away love the place. You lose yourself in a

street off Oxford-street, and wander into a smoky little churchyard and read an almost illegiole inscription on a humble little tombstone to Chapman, who wrote the English Homer, and then you hear yourself thinking.-“ Oft have I travelled in the realms of gold.” You go into St -Paul’s to muse over the uncompromising nomysticism of Wren, and read, cut into a wall tablet, perhaps, the curt record of deeds so gloriously brave that you have to wink hard to keep the tears back. And so on, and so on. Every impression in London is overcharged with a plethora of associations. London is a palimpsest of which the parchment has been so written upon by the never-ending’ procession of its men and women that no coherent impression is decipherable.