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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON'S ENCHANTMENT

H. S. Leigh.

Let them that desire "solitary to wander o'er the russet mead" put on their clump boots and wander.

I prefer the Strand.

The Poet's customary meadow with its munching sheep and æsthetic cow, his pleasing daisies and sublimated dandelions, his ecstatic duck and blooming plum tree, are all very well in their way; but there is more human interest in Seven Dials.

may have a very good time if his self-satisfaction suffice to shelter him from Boredom; but of what use is he to the world or to his fellow-creatures?

I have no patience with the long-haired persons whose scorn of the common people's drudgery finds vent in lofty exhortations to "fly the rank city, shun the turbid air, breathe not the chaos of eternal smoke, and volatile corruption."

By turning his back to "the tumult of a guilty world," and "through the verdant maze of sweetbriar hedges, pursue his devious walk," the Poet provides no remedy for the sin and suffering of human cities—especially if the Poet finds it inconvenient to his soulful rapture to attend to his own washing.

It offends me to the soul to hear robustious, bladder-pated, tortured Bunthornes crying out for "boundless contiguity of shade" where they can hear themselves think, when they might be digging the soil or fixing gaspipes.

I would have such fellows banished to remote solitudes, where they should prove their disdain of the grovelling herd by learning to do without them. I would have them fed, clothed, nursed, caressed, and entertained solely by their own sufficiency. Let them enjoy themselves.

Erycina's doves, they sing, and ancient stream of Simois!

I sing the common people, and the vulgar London streets—streams of life, action, and passion, whose every drop is a human soul, each drop distinct and different, each coloured by his or her own wonderful personality.

I never grow tired of seeing them, admiring them, wondering about them.

Beneath this turban what anxieties? Beneath yon burnoose what heartaches and desires? Under all this sartorial medley of frock-coats, jackets, mantles, capes, cloth, silk, satins, rags, what truth? what meaning? what purport? How to get at the hearts of them? how to evolve the best of them? how to blot out their passions, spites, and rancours, and get at their human kinship and brotherhood?

All day long these streets are crowded with the great, the rich, the gay, and the fair—and if one looks one may also see here the poorest, the most abject, the most pitiful, and most awful of the creatures that God permits to live. There is more wealth and splendour than in all the Arabian Nights, and more misery than in Dante's Inferno.

Such a bustling, jostling, twisting, wriggling wonder! "An intermixed and intertangled, ceaselessly changing jingle, too, of colour; flecks of colour champed, as it were, like bits in the horses' teeth, frothed and strewn about, and a surface always of dark-dressed people winding like the curves on fast flowing water."

There is everything here, and plenty of it. As Malaprop Jenkins wrote to her "O Molly Jones," "All the towns that ever I beheld in my born days are no more than Welsh barrows and crumlecks to this wonderful sitty! Even Bath itself is but a fillitch; in the naam of God, one would think there's no end of the streets, but the Land's End. Then there's such a power of people going hurry-scurry! Such a racket of coxes! Such a noise and halibaloo! So many strange sites to be seen! O gracious! I have seen the Park, and the Paleass of St. Gimeses, and the Queen's magisterial pursing, and the sweet young princes and the hillyfents, and pybald ass, and