“I wish you to remark, my dear child,” said he, “that between a capital and solitude there is no third choice; nor, I would add, can a mind extract the best of solitude unless it bring urbanity to the wilderness.  Your rustic is no philosopher, and your provincial townsman is the devil:  if you would meditate in Arden, your company must be the Duke, Jaques, Touchstone—­courtiers all—­or, again, Rosalind, the Duke’s daughter, if you would catch the very mood of the forest.  I tell you this, child, that you may not be misled by my example (which has a reason of its own and, I trust, an excuse) into shunning your destiny though it lead and keep you in cities and among crowds; for we have it on the word of no less busy a man than the Emperor Marcus Aurelius that to seek out private retiring-rooms for the soul such as country villages, the sea-shore, mountains, is but a mistaken simplicity, seeing that at what time soever a man will it is in his power to retire into himself and be at rest, dwelling within the walls of a city as in a shepherd’s fold of the mountain.  So also the sainted Juan de Avila tells us that a man who trusts in God may, if he take pains, recollect God in streets and public places better than will a hermit in his cell; and the excellent Archbishop of Cambrai, writing to the Countess of Gramont, counselled her to practise recollection and give a quiet thought to God at dinner times in a lull of the conversation, or again when she was driving or dressing or having her hair arranged; these hindrances (said he) profited more than any engouement of devotion.

“But,” he went on, “to bear yourself rightly in a crowd you must study how one crowd differs from another, and how in one city you may have that great orderly movement of life (whether of business or of pleasure) which is the surrounding joy of princes in their palaces, and an insensate mob, which is the most brutal and vilest aspect of man.  For as in a thronged street you may learn the high meaning of citizenship, so in a mob you may unlearn all that makes a man dignified.  Yet even the mob you should study in a capital, as Shakespeare did in his ‘Julius Caesar’ and ‘Coriolanus;’ for only so can you know it in its quiddity.  I conjure you, child, to get your sense of men from their capital cities.”

He had something to tell of almost every great house we passed.  He seemed—­he that had saluted no one as we crossed the Mall, saluted of none—­to walk this quarter of London with a proprietary tread; and by and by, coming to the river, he waved an arm and broke into panegyric.

“Other capitals have had their turn, and others will overtake and outstrip her; but where is one in these times to compare with London?  Where in Europe will you see streets so well ordered, squares so spacious, houses so comfortable, yet elegant, as in this mile east and south of Hyde Park?  Where such solid, self-respecting wealth as in our City?  Where such merchant-princes and adventurers as your Whittingtons and Greshams?  Where half its commerce? and where a commerce touched with one tithe of its imagination?  Where such a river, for trade as for pageants?  On what other shore two buildings side by side so famous, the one for just laws, civil security, liberty with obedience, the other for heroic virtues resumed, with their propagating dust, into the faith which sowed all and, having reaped, renews?”