HOLBORN AND BLOOMSBURY

The changing Seasons London at her best Signs of Winter True Londoners Staple Inn Ely Place Gray's Inn Lord Bacon Dr. Johnson and the Bookseller Bedford Row The Foundling Hospital Sunday Services Culture and Advanced Theology The Fifth Commandment Queen Square Edward Irving Lord Thurlow Red Lion Square and the Painters St. George's and the Brewer St. Giles's Bloomsbury--Gower Street and the Wall Fruit Egypt and Greece in London.

I HAVE so often by a curious chance been in Holborn on those days in February and October when the certainty of spring and winter suddenly makes itself felt that I have come to associate the changing seasons inseparably with that road. One can be very conscious there of the approach, of spring, very sure that the reign of winter is at band. Why, I do not know, unless it is that being wide and on high ground Holborn gives the Londoner more than his share of sky, and where else should we look for portents?

I must confess to becoming very restless in London in the early spring. As one hurries over the asphalt the thought of primroses is intolerable. And London has a way of driving home one's losses by its many flower-sellers and by the crocuses and daffodils in the parks. But later after the first rapture is over and the primroses no longer have to be sought but thrust themselves upon one I can remain in London with more composure and wait for the hot weather. London to my mind has four periods when she is more than tolerable, when she is the most desirable abode of all. These are May, when the freshness of the leaves and the clarity of the atmosphere unite to lend her an almost Continental brightness and charm; August at night; November at dusk when the presages of winter are in the air ; and the few days before Christmas, when a good-natured bustle and an electric excitement and anticipation fill the streets. Were I my own master (or what is called one's own master) I would leave London immediately after Christmas and never set foot in her precincts again till the first match at Lord's ; and soon after that I would be off again.

THE ADORATION OF THE KINGS,

FROM THE PAINTING BY JAN GOSSART DE MABUSE IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY

But November would see me back ; for although London beneath a May sun is London at her loveliest, it is when the signs of winter begin to accumulate that to me she is most friendly, most homely. I admire her in May, but I am quite ready to leave her: in November I am glad that I shall not be going away for a long time. She assumes the winter garb so cheerfully and naturally. With the first fog of November she begins to be happy. "Now," one seems to hear her say, "now I am myself again. Summer was all very well, but clear air, and warmth are not really in my line. I am a grey city and a dingy : smoke is the breath of my life: stir your fires and let us be comfortable and gloomy again." In the old days one of the surest signs of winter in London was straw in the 'buses ; but there is not much of it now. The chestnut roasters, however, remain: still as certain harbingers of the winter as the swallows are of the summer. At the street corners you see their merry little furnaces glowing through the peep-holes, and if you will, and are not ashamed, you may fill your pockets with two-penny-worth, and thus, at a ridiculously small expenditure, provide yourself with food and hand-warmers in one. A foreign chestnut-vendor whom I saw the other day in the Strand kept supplies both of roast chestnuts and ice-cream on the same barrow, so that his patrons by purchasing of each could, alternately eating and licking, transport themselves to July or December, Spitzbergen or Sierra Leone. The hot-potato men are perennials, although perhaps they ply their business with less assiduity in summer than winter. I like best those over whose furnace is an arch of spikes, each one impaling a Magnum Bonum like the beads that used to ornament Temple Bar. ("Behold the head of a tater," as a witty lady once remarked.) The sparrows now are a thought tamer than in summer, and the pigeons would be so if that were possible. The chairs have all gone from the parks.

From the fact that I have already confessed to a desire to leave London for quite long periods, and from the confession which I now make that few pleasures in life seem to me to surpass the feeling of repose and anticipation and liberty that comes to one as one leans back in the carriage of an express train steaming steadily and noiselessly out of one of the great London stations, the deduction is easy that I am but an indifferent Londoner. With the best intentions in the world I cannot have deceived any reader into thinking me a good one. I am too critical: the true Londoner loves his city not only passionately but indiscriminately. She is all in all to him. He loves every aspect of her, every particular, because all go to the completion of his ideal, his mistress. None the less (although I suggest that my travels would assist in disqualifying me), his love does not prevent him from leaving her: you meet true Londoners all over the world; indeed it is abroad that you find them most articulate, for the London tendency to ridicule emotion and abbreviate displays of sentiment (except on the melodramatic stage) prevents them at home from showing their love as freely as they can do abroad. At home they are sardonic, suspicious, chary of praise ; but in the lonely places of the earth and in times of depression all the Londoner comes out.

Every one knows how Private Ortheris, in Mr. Kipling's story, went mad in the heat of India and babbled not of green fields but of the Strand and the Adelphi arches, orange peel, wet pavements and flaring gas jets; and on the day on which I am writing these words I find in a paper a quotation from an article in a medical magazine, by the lady superintendent of a country sanatorium for consumptives, who says that once having a patient who was unmistakably dying, and having written to his friends to receive him again, they replied that his home off the Euston Road was so wretched that they hoped she could keep him; which she would have done but for the man himself, who implored her to send him back "where he could hear once more the 'buses in the Euston Road." There, in these two men, one in India and one dying in East Anglia, speaks the true Londoner. No transitory visitor to the city can ever acquire this love ; I doubt if any one can who did not spend his childhood in it.

The Londoner speaking here is the real thing: the home sickness which he feels is not to be counterfeited. It is not the least sad part of Charles Lamb's latter days that he was doomed to Enfield and Edmonton, and that when he did get to London now and then it was peopled by ghosts and knew him not. No wonder he shed tears to find that St. Dunstan's iron figures the wonders of his infancy, as those in Cheapside have been the wonders of ours had vanished. This is the real love of London, which I for one cannot pretend to, much as I should value it. London is neither my mother nor my stepmother ; but I love her always a little, and now and then well on the other side of idolatry.

There is that other type of Londoner, too, that is in love not with its sights and savours but with its intellectual variety a type fixed for me in the late Theodore Watts-Dunton, whom when, almost a boy, I was for the first time in his company, I heard say that he "dared not leave London for fear some new and interesting figure should arrive during his absence and be missed by him."

Meanwhile what of Holborn and Bloomsbury?

Holborn is chiefly remarkable for that row of old houses opposite Gray's Inn Road which gives so false an impression of this city to visitors who enter it at Euston or St. Pancras or King's Cross, and speeding down the Gray's Inn Road in their hansoms, see this wonderful piece of medievalism before them. "Is London like that?" they say; and prepare for pleasures that will not be fulfilled. The houses, which are piously preserved by the Prudential directors, form the north side of Staple Inn, one of the quietest and most charming of the small Inns of Court, with trees full of sparrows, whose clamour towards evening is incredibly assertive, and a beautiful little hall. It is all very old and rather crazy, and it would be well for us now to see it as often as we can, lest its knell suddenly sound and we have not the chance again. Something of the same effect of quietude is to be obtained in the precincts of the Mercers' School, a little to the east, especially in the outer court ; but this is a very minute backwater. For quietude with space you must seek Gray's Inn.

But before exploring Gray's Inn one might look into Ely Place on the other side of the road, at the beginning of Charterhouse Street, for it is old and historic, marking the site of the palace where John of Gaunt died. Sir Christopher,Hatton, who danced before Elizabeth, secured a part of the building and made himself a spacious home there, a tenancy still commemorated by Hatton Garden, close by, where the diamond merchants have their mart. Ely Place, as it now stands, was built at the end of the eighteenth century, but the chapel of the ancient palace still remains, and has passed to the Roman Catholics, who have made it beautiful. The crypt is one of the quietest sanctuaries in London.