In no street out of the city are omnibuses so constant as in the Strand, although to see the London 'bus at its best, I think Whitehall is the place. As they come down the hill from Charing Cross into the spaciousness of the road opposite the Horse Guards, like ships in full sail, swaying a little under their terrific onset, and shining gaily in all their hues, they are full of the joy of life and transmit some of it to the spectator. What London would be without its coloured omnibuses one dares not think. After the first flush of Spring, almost all her gaiety comes from them. Whitehall is the best at all times, but in April and May, when the trees (always a fortnight earlier than in the country) are vivid on the edge of the Green Park, and the sun has a nearly level ray, there is nothing to equal the smiling loveliness of Piccadilly filled with omnibuses, as seen from the top of the hill, looking east, about Down Street. It is an indescribable scene of streaming colour and gentle vivacity.

Mention of the slanting sun brings me back to the Strand; for there is nothing more beautiful in its way certainly a way peculiar to London them that crowded bus-filled street at the same afternoon hour, with the light on the white spire of St. Mary's at the east end. It is a graver, less Continental, beauty than Piccadilly's : but it is equally indelible. Almost it makes me forgive the Strand.

St. Mary's church, like St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, is not, as most people would tell you, one of Wren's, but was built by Gibbs. Everything possible was done, some few years ago, to get permission to demolish it, for what were called the "Strand improvements"; but happily in vain. All honour to the resisters. The famous Maypole in the Strand stood on the site of this church. A cedar trunk, one hundred and thirty-four feet high, it was erected in 1661 in honour either of the Restoration or (and here comes in the sweet of ignorance) because a Strand farrier's daughter, the wife of General Monk, had become the Duchess of Albemarle. It is very unfair to Gibbs to have allowed such giant edifices as Australia House and the Bush Building to be erected so near St. Mary's spire. But the Bush Building is a splendid addition to London's architecture, all the same.

Close to St. Mary's church is Strand Lane, a narrow alley descending to the river, notable for containing one of the most unexpected and interesting survivals in all London: nothing less than a bath constructed by the Romans when they inhabited Britain, and still usable, although not, I believe, used. A modest sixpence (this is one of the few charges that have not been increased since the War) entitles one to enter and examine this curiosity.

St. Clement's Inn, close by St. Clement Danes, a few years ago was still a backwater of peace, but is now obliterated and new houses bear its name Clement's Inn, where young Master Shallow of Warwickshire, Little John Dolt of Staffordshire, Black George Barnes of Staffordshire, and Francis Pickbone and Will Squele, a Cotswold man, were the devil's own swinge-bucklers. How could we pull it down? But we would pull down anything. And New Inn, close by, of which Sir Thomas More was a member that has gone too. Men, as I remarked before, are not made County Councillors for nothing.

With St. Clement Danes church, just to the east of St. Mary's Le Strand, and, like that, most gloriously in the very middle of the road, we come at last to the true Wren. It was in this church, one of London's whitest where it is white of a whiteness, under certain conditions of light, surpassing alabaster that Dr. Johnson had his pew, from which, we are told, he made his responses with tremulous earnestness. The pew was in the north gallery, where a tablet marks the spot, styling him (and who shall demur?) "the philosopher, the poet, the great lexicographer, the profound moralist and chief writer of his time." Among those buried either here or in the cemetery of the church in Portugal Street, now demolished, are Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee, the dramatists ; Joe Miller, who made all the jokes, and in addition to being a "facetious companion," as his epitaph says, was a "tender husband" and "sincere friend," as humorists should be; Dr. Kitchiner, the author of "The Cook's Oracle" and himself a "notable fork"; and Ackermann, the publisher of the "Repository," which everyone who loves the London of the Regency, its buildings and costumes, in the fairest of all the methods of counterfeiting a city's life, namely copper-plate and aquatint, should know, and if possible possess.

And here at the Griffin, opposite the most fantastically and romantically conceived Law Courts in the world the most astounding assemblage of spires, and turrets, and gables, and cloisters, that ever sprang from one Englishman's brain, we leave the Strand and pass into Fleet Street, or, in other words, into the City of London.