"Greece, Egypt, Rome--did any god, Before whose feet men knelt unshod, Deem that in this unblest abode Another scarce more unknown god Should house with him"-- If these dead stones could feel, would they not lament their departed glory? The heroic figure of Mausolus, who, on the pinnacle of his temple, once drove his marble car, the cynosure of all eyes and the wonder of the world, outlined against the blue Aegean sky and sea, and the white-walled city; the gigantic bas-reliefs of the Parthenon, whose very existence here is the "shibboleth" of æsthetic criticism, that once adorned the ancient Athenian temple, brilliantly violet and golden against the faint blue line of the bay and hills of Salamis; the famous "Harpy Tomb," torn from its sunny Lycian height, and now glimmering dimly through London fog, guarded by a vigilant policeman,--what former beauties of surrounding nature do they not suggest or recall! We forget, in gazing, the nineteenth-century prose of Bloomsbury, the monotony of its gloomy streets; we forget that we ourselves are "the latest seed of time," the "last word" of the human race, dwelling, amid all the dull luxury of civilisation, in the greatest and richest city of the world. And, leaving the gallery by way of the vast and unique Assyrian collection of sculptures, passing through the two colossal human-headed bulls that guard its entrance, creatures whose excavation from the buried city of Nineveh forms one of the most romantic of modern discoveries; passing out into the misty sunshine and the flying doves before the pediment, we recall again Rossetti's wonderful lines, with their final suggestion of a future lost and rediscovered London--rediscovered under the dust and oblivion of future ages: "And as I turned, my sense half shut Still saw the crowds of kerb and rut Go past as marshalled to the strut Of ranks in gypsum quaintly cut. It seemed in one same pageantry They followed forms which had been erst; To pass, till on my sight should burst That future of the best or worst When some may question which was first, Of London or of Nineveh. "For as that Bull-god once did stand And watched the burial clouds of sand, Till these at last without a hand Rose o'er his eyes, another land, And blinded him with destiny:-- So may he stand again; till now, In ships of unknown sail and prow, Some tribe of the Australian plough Bear him afar--a relic now Of London, not of Nineveh!" CHAPTER XII THEATRICAL AND FOREIGN LONDON --"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players...."--_Shakespeare._ "O gleaming lamps of London, that gem the City's crown, What fortunes lie within you, O lights of London Town!"-- _G. R. Sims, Ballads of Babylon._