E-text prepared by Al Haines
by
New York
E. P. Dutton and Co.
31 West Twenty-Third Street
1907
Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnim.
VIRG., Ecl. viii., l. 72.
For a considerable number of years I had been a resident in London,which city I regarded alternately as my Paradise and my House ofBondage. I am by no means one of those who are always ready to flingopprobrious epithets at London, such as 'a pestilent wen,' a cluster of'squalid villages,' and the like; on the contrary, I regard London asthe most fascinating of all cities, with the one exception of that cityof Eternal Memories beside the Tiber. But even Horace loved theolive-groves of Tivoli more than the far-ranged splendours of thePalatine; and I may be pardoned if an occasional vision of green fieldsoften left my eye insensitive to metropolitan attractions.
This is a somewhat sonorous preface to the small matter of my story;but I am anxious to elaborate it a little, lest it should be imaginedthat I am merely a person of bucolic mind, to whom all cities or largecongregations of my fellow-men are in themselves abhorrent. On thecontrary I have an inherent love of all cities which are something morethan mere centres of manufacturing industry. The truly admirable citysecures interest, and even passionate love, not because it is acongeries of thriving factories, but rather by the dignity of itsposition, the splendour of its architecture, the variety and volume ofits life, the imperial, literary, and artistic interests of which it isthe centre, and the prolongation of its history through tumultuousperiods of time, which fade into the suggestive shadows of antiquity.London answers perfectly to this definition of the truly admirablecity. It has been the stage of innumerable historic pageants; itpresents an unexampled variety of life; and there is majesty in themere sense of multitude with which it arrests and often overpowers themind.
As I have already, with an innocent impertinence, ju