Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 1 | Page 4

TINTERN ABBEY DRYEURGH ABBEY WINDSOR CASTLE
FOLLOWING PAGE 95 THE ALBERT MEMORIAL CHAPEL, WINDSOR THE THRONE ROOM, WINDSOR CASTLE POETS' CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY THE GREAT HALL AT PENSHURST THE ENTRANCE HALL OF BLENHEIM PALACE GUY'S TOWER AND THE CLOCK TOWER, WARWICK CASTLE WARWICK CASTLE THE BEAUCHAMP CHAPEL, WARWICK THE RUINS OF KENILWORTH CASTLE CHATSWORTH ALNWICK CASTLE HOLLAND HOUSE EATON HALL

I
LONDON
A GENERAL SKETCH [Footnote: From articles written for the Toronto "Week." Afterward (1888) issued by The Macmillan Company in the volume entitled "The Trip to England."]
BY GOLDWIN SMITH
The huge city perhaps never imprest the imagination more than when approaching it by night on the top of a coach you saw its numberless lights flaring, as Tennyson says, "like a dreary dawn." The most impressive approach is now by the river through the infinitude of docks, quays, and shipping. London is not a city, but a province of brick and stone. Hardly even from the top of St. Paul's or of the Monument can anything like a view of the city as a whole be obtained.
It is indispensable, however, to make one or the other of these ascents when a clear day can be found, not so much because the view is fine, as because you will get a sensation of vastness and multitude not easily to be forgotten. There is, or was not long ago, a point on the ridge which connects Hampstead with Highgate from which, as you looked over London to the Surrey Hills beyond, the modern Babylon presented something like the aspect of a city. The ancient Babylon may have vied with London in circumference, but the greater part of its area was occupied by open spaces; the modern Babylon is a dense mass of humanity....
The Empire and the commercial relations of England draw representatives of trading committees or subject races from all parts of the globe, and the faces and costumes of the Hindu, the Parsee, the Lascar and the ubiquitous Chinaman mingle in the motley crowd with the merchants of Europe and America. The streets of London are, in this respect, to the modern what the great Palace of Tyre must have been to the ancient world. But pile Carthage on Tyre, Venice on Carthage, Amsterdam on Venice, and you will not make the equal, or anything near the equal, of London.
Here is the great mart of the world, to which the best and richest products are brought from every land and clime, so that if you have put money in your purse you may command every object of utility or fancy which grows or is made anywhere without going beyond the circuit of the great cosmopolitan city. Parisian, German, Russian, Hindu, Japanese, Chinese industry is as much at your service here, if you have the all-compelling talisman in your pocket, as in Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Benares, Yokohama, or Peking. That London is the great distributing center of the world is shown by the fleets of the carrying trade of which the countless masts rise along her wharves and in her docks. She is also the bank of the world. But we are reminded of the vicissitudes of commerce and the precarious tenure by which its empire is held when we consider that the bank of the world in the middle of the last century was Amsterdam.
The first and perhaps the greatest marvel of London is the commissariat. How can the five millions be regularly supplied with food, and everything needful to life, even with such things as milk and those kinds of fruits which can hardly be left beyond a day? Here again we see reason for excepting to the sweeping jeremiads of cynicism, and concluding that tho there may be fraud and scamping in the industrial world, genuine production, faithful service, disciplined energy, and skill in organization, can not wholly have departed from the earth. London is not only well fed, but well supplied with water and well drained. Vast and densely peopled as it is, it is a healthy city. Yet the limit of practical extension seems to be nearly reached. It becomes a question how the increasing multitude shall be supplied not only with food and water, but with air.
The East of London, which is the old city, is, as all know, the business quarter. Let the worshiper of Mammon when he sets foot in Lombard Street adore his divinity, of all whose temples this is the richest and the most famous. Note the throng incessantly threading those narrow and tortuous streets. Nowhere are the faces so eager or the steps so hurried, except perhaps in the business quarter of New York. Commerce has still its center here; but the old social and civic life of the city has fled. What once were the dwellings of the merchants of London are now