FROM A DISTANCE
posterity that his London is the London that we live in but assuredly don't know.
We may take that to be certain. Yet it is not so certain that his London will be as near the real thing as were, in their days, those of Pepys, of Hogarth, or even of Albert Smith. One may hazard that without chanting jeremiads to the art of to-day. But we may set it down that Pepys going out from Dover to welcome Charles II. had somewhere at the back of his head an image of his London—of a town of a few strongly marked features, of a certain characteristic outline, of jagged roofs, or over-hanging upper storeys, of a river that was a highway for ever clamorous with the cry of "Oars".
So, too, had Hogarth when at Calais. Dickens, posting as the Uncommercial Traveller towards France over Denmark Hill, may almost have had an impression of a complete and comparatively circumscribed London. But so many things—as obvious as the enormously increased size, as secondary as the change in our habits of locomotion—militate against our nowadays having an impression, a remembered bird's-eye-view of London as a whole.
The Londoner bites off from his town a piece large enough for his own chewing. We have no symbol of London comparable to the Lutetia of Paris; none to set beside the figure on the reverse of our copper coins. It is comparatively easy to have in the mind the idea of a certain green island familiar in its backward tilt towards the shores of Europe, familiar in its rugged
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