I do not know what it is in London that at long last and in some quite impersonal way clutches at the heart and receives one’s eager affection.  At first, even though you be one of her children, she seems and for how long like something fallen, calling you with the monotonous, mighty, complaining voice of a fallen archangel, ceaselessly through the days, the years, the centuries and the ages.  She is one of the oldest of European cities, she is one of the most beautiful, of all capitals she is by far the most full of character:  and yet she is not easy to know or to love.  Perhaps she does not belong to us, but is something apart, something in and for herself, a mighty and a living thing, owing us nothing and regarding us, whom she tortures, with a sort of indifference, if not contempt.

And yet she is ours after all; she belongs to us, is more perhaps our very likeness and self than the capital of any other people.  What is Berlin but a brutalised village, or Paris now but cosmopolis, or Rome but a universe?  She is ours, the very gate of England of my heart.  For she stands there striding the boundary of my country, the greatest of our cities, the greatest even of our industrial cities—­a negative to all the rest.  To the North she says Nay continually, for she is English, the greater successor of Winchester, and in her voice is the soul of the South, the real England, the England of my heart.

Ah, we have never known her or loved her enough or understood that she is a universe, without the self-consciousness of lesser things or the prepared beauty of mortal places.  Indeed, she has something of the character of the sea which is our home, its changefulness, its infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life that traverses it.  Almost featureless if you will, she is always under the guidance of her ample sky, responding immediately to every mood of the clouds; and in her, beauty grows up suddenly out of life and is gone e’er we can apprehend it....

But to come into Southwark on a Spring morning in search of Chaucer and the Tabard Inn is to ask of London more than she will give you.  It is strange, seeing that she is so English, that for her the living are more than the dead.  Consider England, southern England, if you know her well enough, and remember what in the face of every other country of Europe she has conserved of the past in material and tangible things—­roads, boundaries, churches, houses, and indeed whole towns and villages.  Yet London has so little of her glory and her past about her in material things, that it is often only by her attitude to life you might know she is not a creation of yesterday.  It is true the fire of 1666 destroyed almost all, but apparently it did not destroy the Tabard Inn, which nevertheless is gone—­it and its successors.