THE STRAND AND COVENT GARDEN

The Strand A Cosmopolitan Street Waterloo Bridge and white stone The Adelphi The Brothers Adam Adelphi Terrace and Buckingham Street Samuel Pepys, a great Londoner The old Palaces The Covent Garden stalwarts A modern bruiser New thoroughfares Will's Coffee House Charles and Mary Lamb The Lyceum Benedick and Beatrice Dr. Primrose and Olivia Essex Street The picturesque omnibus A Piccadilly scene St. Mary's Le Strand The Maypole St. Clement Danes The Law Courts.

I COULD not, I think, explain why, but I have more distaste for the Strand than for any street in London.

I would avoid it as carefully, from pure unreasoning prejudice, as Count D'Orsay and Dick Swiveller avoided certain other districts on financial grounds. This, I fear, proves me to be only half a Londoner if that; for the Strand to many people is London, all else being extraneous. They endure their daily tasks elsewhere only because such endurance provides them with the means to be in the Strand at night.

The most Bohemian of London streets, if the Strand could cross to Paris it would instantly burgeon into a boulevard. Its prevailing type is of the stage : the blue chin of Thespis is very apparent there, and the ample waistcoat of the manager is prominent too. Except at night, on the way to the Gaiety, the fashionable youth avoid the Strand ; and indeed the best-dressed men and women are not seen on its pavements, howsoever they may use its carriage way. But with these exceptions, all London may be studied there; and other nations too, for the great hotels and Charing Cross station tend to cosmopolitanise it. Probably at no hour of the day or night are more than half the Strand's population true Londoners.

If the Strand is too much for you, as it may easily be, the escape is very simple. You may be on the banks of the Thames in two minutes from any part of it, or on the beautiful Adelphi Terrace, or among the flowers and greenery of Covent Garden, or amid the peace of the Savoy chapel or the quietude of Essex Street. Standing at the Surrey end of Waterloo Bridge on a sunny afternoon you get one of the best views of London that is to be had and learn something of the possibilities of the city's white stone. Somerset House from this point is superb, St. Paul's as beautiful and fragile as any of Guardi's Venetian domes. Above the green of the trees and the Temple lawns and the dull red of the new Embankment buildings, broken here and there by a stone block, you see Wren's spires pricking the sky, St. Bride's always the most noticeable; and then, far back, gleaming with its whiteness and the gold of its figure of Justice, is the massive Central Criminal Court, to add an extra touch of light. Culminating statues gilded or otherwise are beginning to be quite a feature of London buildings. The New Gaiety Theatre has one ; Telephone House in Temple Avenue has a graceful Mercury; over the Savoy portico stands a noble Crusader ; over Romano's doorway dance a group of bronze Cupids. Less ambitious but not less pleasing is the gold galleon forming a weather-vane on what used to be the Astor Estate office, which is as fine in its way as the Flying Dragon on Bow Church in Cheapside. I suppose that every one of London's bridges could claim to have wonderful views ; indeed, each might claim the best. From the Tower Bridge you see the Tower and the shipping ; from London Bridge -.on see the Tower Bridge; from the Charing Cross foot-bridge, when there is no traffic to distract, the prospect is very similar to that from Waterloo Bridge with the advantage that that fine structure is included, and on a misty morning London is enchanted and the new Bush Building is seen rising above Somerset House like a medieval Castle Keep.

The Adelphi, which dates from 1768, consists of the Terrace, standing high overlooking the river, and its neighbouring streets, John Street, Robert Street, James Street, William Street and Adam Street, together with the arches beneath. It was the work of the Scotch architects Robert, John, James and William Adam, who in its generic title and in those four streets celebrate for ever their relationship and their names. The Terrace must be seen from the Embankment or the river if its proportions are to be rightly esteemed; and one must go within one of the houses to appreciate the beauty of the Adam ceilings and fireplaces, which are the perfect setting for the furniture of Heppelwhite and Sheraton. English taste in decoration and design has certainly never since reached the height of delicacy and restraint it then knew.

No house in the Terrace has been replaced or very seriously tampered with, and all have some interesting association, chief among them being No. 4, where in 1779 the gaiety of nations was eclipsed by the death of Garrick. The other Adelphi streets have historic memories too. Disraeli always believed that he was born at No. 2 James Street, in a library, although the facts seem to be against him; at No. 18 John Street is the Society of Arts, and at No. 2 Robert Street lived Thomas Hood, who sang the "Song of the Shirt."

More ancient is the district between the Adelphi and the Charing Cross District Railway station. Here we go back a hundred years before the Adelphi was built, to associations with the great name of Buckingham Buckingham. Street, Duke Street, and Villiers Street being its chief quarters. Of these Buckingham Street retains most signs of age. Samuel Pepys lived there for many years, in the south-west corner house overlooking the river, which he probably came to think his own ; Peter the Great lodged at the opposite corner; Jean Jacques Rousseau and David Hume were together in Buckingham Street in 1765, before they entered upon their great and unphilosophic quarrel; Etty painted at, No. 14 and Clarkson Stanfield's studio was below him.

Pepys' companion diarist John Evelyn resided for a while in Villiers Street, which is now given up to cheap eating-houses and meretricious shops, and on Sunday evenings is packed with rough boys and girls. Steele lived here after the death of his wife. The street is much changed since then, for Charing Cross station robbed it of its western side.

I am inclined to think that when all is said Pepys is the greatest of the Londoners a fuller, more intensely alive, Londoner than either Johnson or Lamb. Perhaps he wins his pre-eminence rather by his littleness, for to be a Londoner in the highest one must be rather trivial or at least be interested in trivialities. Johnson was too serious, Lamb too imaginative, to compete with this busy Secretary. Neither was such an epicure of life, neither, found the world fresh every morning as he did. It is as the epicure of life that he is so alluring. His self-revelations are valuable in some degree, and his picture of the times makes him perhaps the finest understudy a historian ever had ; but Pepys' greatness lies in his appreciation of good things. He lived minute by minute, as wise men do, and he extracted whatever honey was possible. Who else has so fused business and pleasure? Who else has kept his mind so open, so alert? Whenever Pepys found an odd quarter of an hour he sang or strummed it away with a glad heart; whenever he walked abroad his eyes were vigilant for pretty women. No man was more amusable. He drank "incomparable good claret" as it should be drunk, and loved it ; he laughed at Betterton, he ogled Nelly Gwynn, he intrigued with men of affairs, he fondled his books, he ate his dinner, all with gusto and his utmost energy. Trivial he certainly was, but his enjoyment is his justification. Samuel Pepys was a superb artist in living. He was a man of insatiable inquisitiveness : there was always something he considered "pretty to see"; and it was this gift of curiosity that made him the best of Londoners. He had also the true Londoner's faculty of bearing with equanimity the trials of others, for all through the Great Plague and the Great Fire he played his lute with cheerfulness.

Turning into the pleasant Embankment Gardens at the foot, one comes at once upon the York Water Gate, which was built by the Duke of Buckingham on the shore of the river to admit boats to his private staithe, those being the days when the Thames was a highway of fashion. To-day it is given up to commerce. But he did not complete his design of rebuilding the old Palace; the gate is all that now remains ; and the site of York House is covered by Buckingham Street and its companion just as the site of Durham House, where Raleigh lived, is beneath the Adelphi, and that of Arundel House beneath Arundel Street and its neighbourhood, and that of old Somerset House beneath the present building of the same name.

Only two relics of the old Strand palaces remain : the York Water Gate and the Savoy chapel, one of London's perfect buildings, dating from 1505 and offering in its quietude the completest contrast to the bustle of the surrounding neighbourhood. The outside walls alone represent the original structure, and they, I fancy, only in parts. Among those who lie beneath its stones are Mrs. Anne Killigrew, whom Dryden mourned, and George Wither the poet, who sang divinely in prison of the consolations of the muse.

The memorial to that stalwart journalist W. T. Stead, which has been set up on the river side of the Embankment opposite the foot of Essex Street, should be looked for, because it has on it two of those charming little bronze figures for which Sir George Frampton, the sculptor who designed it, is justly famous. St. George's spear is periodically renewed and as regularly stolen. A little farther on towards the city is the War Memorial to the submarine heroes. On the Adelphi side will be found the group of statuary which Belgium gave to England in token of her help and sympathy in the War. I am not very fond of it, but there is something in its austerity that commands respect. A close examination of Cleopatra's needle and the attendant sphinxes will reveal the wounds inflicted by a German bomb which fell near here one memorable night. The scarred place at the foot of the Nelson Column, on the pedestal of one of the lions on the Cockspur Street side, was due, however, only indirectly to War, for it was the result of a bonfire lighted there by some over-enthusiastic revellers on Armistice Night. The War Memorial to the Air Force is on the Embankment opposite the County Council Hall.

Covent Garden being for the most part a wholesale market, it has none of the interest of the Paris Hallos, where the old women preside over stalls of fruit and vegetables arranged with exquisite neatness, and make up pennyworths and two pennyworths with so thoughtful an eye to the preservation of economy. We have nothing like that in London. In London if you want two pennyworth of mixed salad you must buy six pennyworth and throw away the balance, economy being one of the virtues of which we are ashamed; nor do we encourage open-air stalls except for the poor. Hence where it is retail Covent Garden deals only in cut flowers and rare fruits.