all but touching one another, or what interval there might have been betwixt is, by the care of architects, in some manner harassed and beset.

Add to this the black garments of the crowd, which make every man conspicuous in the light, and the abrupt and minute patches of white—exceedingly pure white of sharp shapes and angles—scattered throughout the drifting and intercrossing multitude. The white of a footman’s shirt, the white of the collars of innumerable men, the white letters of advertisements, the white of the label at the back of cabs and hansoms, and many and many another little square, triangle, and line of white, are visible to the utmost distances. They have an emphasis that is never softened; nothing, except snow, could be whiter; and nothing, perhaps, makes so salient a part of the enormous fragmentariness of the street view.

There might be as much detail in some other scenes, but that they have not these shreds and patches of black and white. Of all landscape, for instance, that of the small culture of Italy and of parts of the East is, perhaps, the most minute. A little rill of vine is crossed by a short patch of corn, and among all the sprinkled foliage of fruit-trees, the olive, with the smallest leaf of all, is the most constant. There is no liberty, and your sight is taken in a net of green crops; it is trapped on the ground by tendrils of cucumber, and cannot rise because of maize and beans, nor can it fly for branches. No tract of grass is wide enough to make a space of quiet green, and the eyes are kept busy by delicate things in perpetual interchange. It is not the multitude of a wide clover-field, where one stroke of the breeze turns a million little faces of flowers eastwards, for there is hardly any repetition, but an unending obstruction. Nor can you see anything that is quite simple, unless, pushing aside a branch of fig-tree with this hand, and a bough of peach with that, you lift your eyes to the indescribable simplicity of the distance of mountains.

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AN IMPRESSION.

Or there is infinite detail in a Thames-side bank of woods between Maidenhead and Cookham, when all the leaves are out, and all still young—the characteristic local green of beech, alder, poplar, and ash, all still unlike each other and undarkened; every separate leaf faced with colour and light, and backed by mystery and shadow. But yet neither this nor anything else in nature shows the innumerable minuteness of London in the sun. The summer sun sends a peremptory summons to every patch of omnibus, red or blue, to every scrap of harness, to all the broken, inconsequent accents, all equal, all divided, and all leaping to light.

In regard to movement, the scenery of the streets has no likeness to anything in nature. Clouds wing one way, streams flow, trees toss, thrill, and remain, but the crowd moves all ways without ever changing its spots, its dull violence of colour and contrast. Summer and day make the streets impossible for the painter. But the summer of London is most local and characteristic—not only in the west, when the scent of mignonette and the recurrent click of the bearing-rein and bit where carriages stand waiting are the very signs of town; summer at the Bank, summer that gives to the walls of Lombard Street a faint hint of reflected light, and fills at a glance ten thousand serried windows with the images of the sun. If there is everywhere a lack of spirit and sweetness, it is only that sunshine, with every tree and every flower, is converted to London and turns a Londoner.

But such charm as there may still be in the touches of the sun are perceptible rather in the few streets that keep their ancient narrowness. Here there is precisely the possibility of that inter-reflection of sunshine and warm light, from house to facing house, which in its gentle splendour is the chief loveliness of summer in southern cities, where walls are here and there blank, and tenderly coloured. Reflected light is the beauty of shadows, and really one may see a shadow faintly so transformed in the course of the delicate curves of City streets. Such curves are not in the wider streets; they are beautiful, apart from the chances and changes of light which they foster, and many a narrow street leading to the right and to the left out of Cheapside, or some other of the central London ways, takes curves as subtle as those of a swimming fish’s tail. Otherwise London curves are distressingly ugly and dreary—those of a crescent, for example. But as much as the crescent offends, the light wave of a fish’s-tail street pleases the eye, with its fine deflections. A wave of this kind is frequent enough in villages, but a certain height in the houses gives it all its character in London.

Some of these alleys, on one side at least, have also the charm, which is the rarest thing in town, of a certain steepness in incline. They dip as they waver, with a motion that tells of a direction towards water. Whether in village or town there is sea or river, a hidden Mediterranean or a hidden Thames, at the level to which the sway and swing of the path will settle. And throughout London the direction of streets seems to be a rather secret thing, and misleading—the sign of a town that has not been ordered as a machine is ordered, but has felt its way like an organism. Slight tendencies, convergences, divergences, lead the streets wandering and draw lines long astray. Old and forgotten causes have brought to pass the slight misgoing that first takes the streets apart—old rights or the accidents of private liberty; and what these began the chances of sequence have ended, a mile astray. Doubtless, besides, the swing of the river has tended to set streets a-flowing too.

But the downward fluctuation of little City streets towards the water is a briefer thing, and as full of drawing as the upper line of a flexible fan foreshortened. The long straying streets are too vague for drawing. In these City lanes, too, there is some rest for the eyes from the infinite detail of the street, and even from the tyranny of windows. Only in their warehouses are to be found spaces of plain wall, but unluckily the plain wall is also black.

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END OF A WINTER DAY.

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The Embankment at Night.

THE CLIMATE OF SMOKE

It is some little treason to a natural storm to admire too eagerly the mimic wrack and menace of the paltry tempest of the smoke. Only by acknowledging the climate of London to be more than half an artificial climate, and by treating our own handiwork—the sky of our manufacture—with a relative contempt, are we excused for thinking the effects in any sense beautiful. Let us avoid serious words of description. The whirls of floating smoke that darken the sunset are ‘lurid’ to no very grand purpose; and the threat from even twice as many kitchen fires never would be terrible. It is a tale signifying nothing. Let us grant that there is now and then an effect of handsome grime, but there is no system in this scenery of smoke. What form seems at times to declare