This page has been validated.
THE SOUL OF LONDON
CHAPTER I
FROM A DISTANCE
I
Thought of from sufficiently far, London offers to the mind's eye singularly little of a picture. It is essentially "town," and yet how little of a town, how much of an abstraction. One says, "He knows his London," yet how little more will he know of London than what is actually "his." And, if by chance he were an astronomer, how much better he might know his solar system.
It remains in the end always a matter of approaches. He has entered it—your man who knows his London—in one or other more or less strongly featured quarter; in his Bloomsbury of dismal, decorous, unhappy, glamorous squares; in his Camden Town of grimy box-like houses, yellow gas and perpetual ring of tram-horse
3
