Thomas Freeman (1614).

"Hogsdon" has come to Hygate long since, as our friend Cartmel, wearily pedalling his bicycle through the up-piled accumulation of dingy streets that divide his slum from my elevated fastness, can sadly testify.

Where will "she" be a hundred years hence?

Where when "she" is finished?

I wonder.

James I. predicted that London would shortly be England and England would be London. Yet London in his time was literally the village that modern facetiousness calls it.

Little more than fifty years ago a magazine writer, bewailing London's vastness, declared that it must on no account be permitted to grow larger. The population was then less than a million and a half.

The monstrous growth which has taken place since then and the stupendous rate of present increase fill the thoughtful observer with dread. The problems of communication and distribution grow year by year more complicated and difficult.[137]
[138]
[139] The congestion of clever men attracted from all parts of the country by the glitter of the capital, impoverishes the provinces, and fills London with starving unemployed talent, much of which gradually degenerates into hopeless drunkenness, or still more degraded flunkeyism. The surplus artists, sculptors, writers, and actors stagnating and rotting in London would, and should, set up throughout the counties living, healthy, beneficial schools of art, culture, and general enlightenment.

The only comfort visible in the actual distortion is, that by its wholesale exaggeration of the evils afflicting the whole country, it will the more speedily bring a breakdown of the whole system, and so precipitate its own cure. Through the growth of population between 1866 and 1891 the "value" of land in London increased by £110,000,000. Ground in the City is sold at the rate of ten guineas per superficial foot. £16,000,000 a year is drawn as rent of land whose agricultural value is about £16,000 a year. That is to say, the people of London have to pay £50 every year for what would have cost, but for their own industry, only one shilling.

But these are matters for discussion in weightier works than mine. Here I merely skim the surface, and catch the superficial fact.

For instance, I observe that London's growth is steadily destroying London's picturesqueness. The embowered palaces of dukes and earls are giving place, more or less, to workmen's model dwellings; and the spots, such as Charing Cross and Tower Hill, where kings and princes were formerly decapitated in a gentlemanly way, never rise nowadays beyond the breaking of the crowns of rude and clamorous agitators.

Nowhere, in short, is Democracy advancing so visibly as in London; nowhere is it so manifestly pushing back, and crawling over, and supplanting Aristocracy.

Southwark's palaces have been famous for hundreds of years. St. Saviour's Church, where the bones of Fletcher and Massinger and Edmond Shakespeare are laid, was built on the site of a church built before the Norman Conquest, from the profits of a ferry across the Thames. Anne Boleyn had an abode here, and hither rode the enterprising Royal Henry to walk and talk with her. Elizabeth came by water with the French Ambassador to see the bull-baiting in the building near the Globe Theatre.

A famous old London tavern, the Tabard, from which Chaucer's nine-and-twenty pilgrims started on their journey, stood near London Bridge within living memory. In Southwark too, until our time, stood the galleried inn where Mr. Pickwick discovered Sam Weller. In fact, Southwark was, until our time, full of historical associations, and once ranked amongst London's most fashionable suburbs. Now it is a labyrinth of slums, and Barclay & Perkins' brewery occupies the site of the Bankside Globe Theatre.

The narrow thoroughfares between the Strand and the river, where modern provincial visitors have their caravanserais, rustled once with fashionable satins and groaned under the weight of gilded coaches. Here dwelt dukes and earls and the pick of our nobility. Mark Twain, in The Prince and the Pauper, has pictured for us a Royal river pageant, such as many bright and flashing eyes must have beheld from the windows and steps of the palaces that lined the Strand or Middlesex bank of the Thames between London and Westminster, for the king's town residence stood hard by in Whitehall; and thence to his country palace at Greenwich—Elizabeth's favourite "Manner of Pleasaunce"—the richly caparisoned and silk-canopied State barges fluttered splendidly.

Now the stateliest craft that ride the Cockney surge are the rackety penny packet and dingily plebeian coal barge.

Soho, the dingy resort of foreign refugees, was formerly a district of great mansions, glimpses of whose former grandeur can still be distinguished beneath their present grime.

James the First's unlucky son, Henry, Raleigh's friend and the people's favourite, built himself a mansion in Gerrard Street, behind the site of the present Shaftesbury Theatre. Dryden lived in the same street, and here stood Dr. Johnson's favourite club, the Turk's Head.

Charles the Second's "natural" son, the Duke of Monmouth, the ill-starred, ambitious soldier who figures as the hero of Dryden's "Absalom," and who was beheaded, at the third stroke of the axe, on Tower Hill, had a palace in Soho Square where now stand gloomy warehouses; and in the same square, Sir Cloudesley Shovel, Gilbert Burnet, and George Colman the Elder, formerly made history and literature where Crosse & Blackwell now make pickles.

The whole district is, as Bottom might have said with more than usual accuracy, "translated." It is become the stronghold and fastness of the foreigner and of his cheap and excellent restaurants.

Nowhere in the world are cheaper or more varied dinners to be had. The odours of the fried fish of Jerusalem here mingle with the perfume of the sauerkraut of Germany, and the cheeses of France and Italy; and over all, blending them into one harmonious whole, serenely soars the powerful aroma of triumphant garlic.

This is but one of the phases of an amazing latter-day development of the Restaurant in London.

Shall I ever forget the horror of the first dinner I ever had in England? The Gargantuan slabs of semi-raw beef, and the bitter, black, treacly "porter," seemed to my mind certain signs that I had fallen among a race of savages and cannibals. But now, instead of the mean, dingy, dirty, fly-blown chop-houses that formerly mocked and balked London's appetite, we have a collection of marble palaces, in which daintily prepared repasts are retailed at lower prices than were formerly charged for the chop-houses' superannuated chunks of brutal flesh.

The Adelaide Gallery, one of the largest of these restaurants, has taken the place of a most respectable Gallery of Practical Science, and the Oxford Street store of the most democratic of wine-importers grows its cobwebs in what, fifty years ago, was accounted one of the most fashionable resorts in Europe. "Two thousand persons of rank and fashion," as I read in an old magazine, "assembled in the splendid structure" at its opening. And it was a splendid structure then, for the architect had introduced niches containing statues of "the heathen deities," with "Britannia, George III., and Queen Charlotte" thrown in! And now, I presume, they are thrown out—or rounded off into a perfectly harmonious circle perhaps, by a supplemental and complementary statue of Ally Sloper.

These tokens of Democracy's advance are not unpleasing; the growth of the restaurant tendency affords one particular pleasure, as suggesting that the English are losing some of their dominant insular fault of sullen individualism, and are becoming more healthily disposed to the communal life.

Much less hopeful is the swelling grandeur of the London gin-palace—the modern substitute for the pleasant tavern.

In mediÆval times, if the earle saw a stately edifice with stained-glass windows, statuary, and everything gorgeous, he would enter with reverence to stoop his head; now, he goes in with fourpence to soak it.

In mediÆval times he would be seen crossing himself with the holy water as he emerged; now, as he comes out, he wipes it off on his coat tail.

In mediÆval times, for their sins and sorrows and the glory of God, the nobles built cathedrals. In this more vulgar age, for the people's griefs and the lords' profit, England's nobility build glorified pot-houses.

In mediÆval times, our chivalry won their knighthood and titles by spoiling the heathen at the sword's point; now, they secure peerages by spoiling English men and women with adulterated and brutalising liquors.

This is what we call the progress of civilisation—

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

But that is neither here nor there.