INTRODUCTORY
flagged with very large, old stones. It is as picturesque as you can imagine; it is a "good thing" for descriptive writing, it might be legitimate to use it. But the trouble is that it is old—and, if the book were all old things, deluding by a love for the picturesque of antiquity, it would give a very false and a very sentimental rendering of London.
But the author might desire to illustrate the tendency of parasitic humanity to lurk in the shadow of wealthy High Streets.—This court would be an excellent illustration: it is peopled with "bad characters," male and female. Or he might desire to illustrate the economic proposition that letting small houses to bad characters is more profitable than selling the land for the erection of flats.—Here, again, the court would be an illustration; its extreme cleanliness, neatness and good repair would go to prove how careful that landlord was to prevent the condemnation of his rookery on sanitary grounds.
The author then must be careful not to sentimentalise over the picturesque. His business is to render the actual. His heart may be—it ought to be—torn at the sight of great hoardings, raised for the house-breakers, round narrow courts, old streets, famous houses. He ought to be alive to the glamour of old associations, of all the old associations in all their human aspects.—But he ought to be equally inspired with satisfaction
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