Westminster is wasted on London. Yet it is the heart of England; the cradle of its laws, of its empire, of its, on the whole, beneficent influence upon the comity of nations. So London extinguishes thoughts about places.
There is in each man of us an Individualist strain more or less strong, and in each, a more or less strong flavour of the Theorist who sees mankind only in the bulk. I imagine the Individualist-half of a man musing like this: "I inhabit a large, pompous, gloomy London house whose atrocious architecture, in any other spot on the globe, would preclude any idea of my ever countenancing it to the extent of becoming its tenant. Two doors off there lives the greatest violinist in the world, next door an old lady who sat on the knee of George IV; her mind is alive with the most vivid of anecdotes of a century or so—and next door on the other side is a girl with a face as beautiful as that of Helen of Troy, a delicate and tremulous walk, a proud neck, a radiant costume. Yet, here, I care nothing about any one of them. They are "the people next door." For here in London we have no more any neighbours.
"In a smaller community I should choose my house carefully; I should talk to and admire the violinist, listen to and rave about the old lady, and no doubt fall in love with the girl like Helen of Troy. But here, her face will launch no ships; the old lady will find no Boswell to record her table talk; the violinist will die and, after his name has filled a decently small space in the obituary columns, will go to his rest in some cemetery—and will ensue oblivion. Had he been born in Argos,
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