should live there, but to live in the country is to incur the negative penalty of the innocent unfortunates in the first circle of the Inferno. They do not actually suffer, but they are irrevocably lost. The numbers, and perhaps the situation of the Londoner, give him a general consciousness of superiority which survives all attack. A proverb, presumably of Lancastrian origin, assures the world that what Manchester thinks to-day England will think to-morrow. What Manchester thinks to-day is doubtless always right, but its local verity is notwithstanding of no greater practical importance in the Cockney's eyes than what Leeds thought yesterday, unless London chooses to endorse it. Yet the temper of the capital has changed, as is only to be expected in a city recruited so largely from outside. A medieval chronicler denounced the Londoners as 'extremely 'proud and avaricious, unbelievers in God and the ancient 'traditions, maintainers of the Lollards, slanderers of religious persons, detainers of tithes, and impoverishers of the common people.' Hatred, like beauty, is here in the eye of the beholder; but Froissart also held that the common people are the periloust 'people of the world and most outrageoust, and specially in England, and specially the Londoners; and they were hardy and high of courage: the more blood they saw shed, the less they were 'abashed.' The intolerance and brutality of the London mob were proverbial in the days of Charles II and George III,* but a Cockney crowd to-day is the most orderly and kindly in the world, and its cherished weapon is irony. Now the man who is habitually ironic is incapable of the more irrational forms of anger. It is not degeneration of physique that has caused the change, for in the late war London troops showed at least as much endurance as the county regiments. Physically, in fact, the new London has been an extraordinarily successful experiment.† In *The military guard round the Bank of England dates from the Gordon riots of 1780. †Natural selection has of course played its part in bringing the ambitious, who are generally physically strong and mentally alert, to London; Dick Whittington is the legendary hero of a million followers. But the poor human driftwood of the provinces has also been sucked into the metropolitan vortex, there to find the obscurity which the immensity of London so readily concedes. the Middle Ages the City was probably no better and no worse than any other urban area; its streets were filthy, its open sanitation primitive, and its population thinned by plague every few years. But the Metropolitan Board of Works and other authorities changed all that for the better. It is often said even now that London consumes and does not produce population. The exact contrary is the case. The City, which is only inhabited by caretakers and charwomen, is indeed sterile, but Greater London produces a large surplus of births over deaths. Its health statistics are the envy of Continental cities, and some of the outlying suburbs, such as Ilford, have a lower mortality than many a watering-place which advertises the longevity conferred by its climate. Not physical decadence, but mental stagnation, has provided a more accessible target. The casual spectator, wearied by the unending monotony of mean or genteel streets, is not surprised to read the indictment of Suburbia as a land of Philistines and platitudes, in which convention rules, a place where souls as well as suits are made to measure, and spiritual dry-rot spreads. The relevance of the criticism can hardly be ignored, or its partial justice denied. The clergy complain that London is either indifferent or purely formal in its belief. It is true that the capital has usually been as moral as can reasonably be expected of man in a naughty world, and decently religious rather than devout. It will hear a great preacher with respect, but contentedly leaves the fervour of revivals to the provinces. On the whole it prefers ethics to emotion, and will subscribe more readily to an orphanage than confess its sins. The Church is always professionally pessimistic, but life from other aspects seems to bear it out. The suburban bookstall offers the alternatives of shockers or slop. The London theatre has become so contemptible that even the managers are apparently ashamed of their wares, and cut the play as short as possible. The cinema, which might have provided, and indeed may yet provide, a new medium of art, seems already strangled in its own conventions; yet it is crowded every night. There is a sense in which the Cockney seeks his emotions, as he plays his games, at second-hand because there is no room for anything else. It is his business to make money; he leaves to others the perilous adventure of life. VOL. 233. NO. 475. H As a But the indictment cannot be pressed too far. commercial city engrossed in trade London has always been accused of materialism. Never was slander more gross nor untruth more palpable; it has been the very nursery of poets. Chaucer, a true Londoner, in his kindly tolerance of nature and deep interest in man, was born in Thames Street by Walbrook, Spenser at East Smithfield near the Tower, Milton in Bread Street, Cheapside, Pope in Lombard Street, Blake the mystic in Golden Square, Keats in Moorfields, and Browning and Swinburne were both Londoners. The list would easily become almost a catalogue of English letters. Ben Jonson and Bacon were both sons of Westminster, but Defoe was a true Cockney of St. Giles, Cripplegate. Newman was born in Broad Street in the heart of the City, Lamb in Crown Office Row, Ruskin in Brunswick Square, and Sir Thomas Browne off Cheapside. Huxley and Trollope, and Gilbert and Sullivan, were all Londoners. No other city in the world can show so long a roll of famous names in literature; the temple of Mammon has been the true fount of the divine fire. London has indeed been monstrously libelled and too little praised; even the Cockney holds a deprecating tone, as when speaking of his wife-but in both cases too long a separation makes him miserable. For forty years of active work he dreams of a cottage in the country; but when the time comes, the mellowed judgment of maturity often prefers the busy pavement. The birthplace of poets, no poet has sung London adequately, for Johnson's laboured verses are deservedly forgotten, and only Wordsworth's lines on seeing the sunrise from Westminster Bridge have obtained a general currency. But Wordsworth was only a countryman, and naturally preferred London when it was asleep, and therefore most like the country. The majesty of London deserves an epic on the gigantic model of 'The Dynasts,' not a sonnet; and the beauty of its physical garment, like the life it covers and in part reveals, is wholly its own—yet it must not be sought, for it reveals itself in strange times and in sundry places. There are days when Oxford Street is merely a noisy highway, but if it had been planned by an artist to catch the dying sun's farewell it could not furnish a richer hue of burnished copper and gold than on an August evening. Fortunately if the vision prove too ecstatic, it can easily be exorcised, for close by lies Harley Street, most depressing of thoroughfares in appearance and trade, and one in which, as in those still more dreary shades to which it leads, they all hope abandon who enter there. Every Cockney, it is true, rhapsodises over the view from Richmond Hill, which at its best is almost equal to a picturepostcard; but this is not the capital at all, but the country as it should be seen-from a discreet distance. It is not here that the secret of London will be found. But twenty miles downstream, there is a little public garden on the Isle of Dogs by which the moving traffic of the river passes like a pageant, with Greenwich as a splendid curtain, and from the heights of the Observatory opposite the full panoply of London lies outstretched beneath a nocturne of cloud and smoke. Here, as the steamers hoot a melancholy farewell to the world's magnet while they drop below Bugsby's Marsh, the heart of London can almost be seen to beat through its greatest artery. No foreigner has ever been known to speak of London without a sneer at its fogs, but few have praised the unrivalled delicacy of its mists and twilight, which Venice cannot equal nor even Paris imitate. Yet on a late autumn afternoon the air takes on a pearly opalescence which makes the whole capital a place of mystery and romance, when its brooding beauty seems a thing not of this nor of any known world, but the insubstantial city of a dream in another dimension. The vision fades, and the grey monotony of brick and slate returns, but for some brief moments the metropolis has been transfigured by a glory not its own; for it is not at Tintern Abbey, but on the Thames Embankment, and in the improbable neighbourhood of the Exchequer and Audit Department, that the light that never was on sea or land may be most nearly realised. A. WYATT TILBY. THE HEAD OF THE HILL The Harrow Life of Henry Montagu Butler, D.D. By EDWARD GRAHAM. With an Introductory Chapter by SIR GEORGE O. TREVELYAN, Bart., O.M. Longmans, Green. 1920. DR. R. Henry Montagu Butler was in some respects unique as a great headmaster, and he was absolutely unique in his governance of Harrow. Never has there been one so intimately, it might be said racially, bound up with a great public school, or so personally the genius of its place. He was the son, a ninth child, of Dr. Butler, the first who stamped a strong individuality on the school where he was teased and bewildered by the young Byron. His mother sprang from the Grays of the adjacent Wembley Park, and, like his own first wife, was bred and married at Harrow. His grandfather died there. His uncle Oxenden served long as its 'lower master,' and his brother George preceded him as a Harrow boy. To crown all, his descendants were to perpetuate the lustre of the Hill and of a family thus associated with it, through four generations. Not only, again, was he the Arnoldian Dr. Vaughan's pet pupil, but by name and natureof dynastic right-he was as much predestined to sway Harrow as the younger Pitt had been to sway England. And, throughout, he worshipped Herga with the devotion of a knight or troubadour. Like his favourite Tennyson's Geraint, he ... loved her as he loved the light of Heaven, And as the light of Heaven varies, now At sunrise, now at sunset, now by night With noon and trembling stars, so loved Geraint In crimson and in purples and in gems.' From the Burke whom he knew by heart he must have remembered that 'To be loved she must be lovely,' and from his Tennyson again, that' Beauty must go beautifully.' He made her blossom like the rose : Super campos caput tollis, Quam dilecta nostra collis.' Gifted with high talents and high character, at once refined and robust, precise and sympathetic, a puritan-cavalier, he |