fidelity, whether the merchants of the Thames were wise to tie themselves so entirely to the grandees of the counties, is no subject for this place. But that the tradition of the town was sincere and continuous cannot be doubted. To this day the Lord Mayor of London is probably proud that the King of England can only enter London by his leave. That fact is as close a summary of the purely political history of London as one could want. It exactly expresses the victory of the merchants over the central power. It is often observed that the French think the Lord Mayor of London more important than the King. They are an acute people. This rather surly love of liberty (or rather of independence) is written in the straggling map of London, and proclaimed in its patchwork architecture. There is in it something that every Englishman feels in himself, though he does not always feel it to be good; something of the amateur; something of the eccentric. The nearest phrase is the negative one of “unofficial.” London is so English, that it can hardly be called even the capital of England. It is not even the county town of the county in which it stands. That title, I believe, belongs to Brentford, which legend credits with two kings at once, like Lacedaemon. It is just London. As his French friend said about Browning, its centre is not in the middle. The Parliament sits in London, but not in the City, of London; the City of London is not under the London County Council; and in spite of the opinion of General Choke, the Sovereign does not live in the Tower. Crowded and noisy as it is, there is something shy about London: it is full of secrets and anomalies; and it does not like to be asked what it is for. In this, there is not a little of its history as a sort of half-rebel through so many centuries. Hence it is a city of side streets that only lead into side streets; a city of short cuts--that take a long time. There have been recent changes in the other direction, of course; but the very name of one of them, unintentionally illustrates something not native to the place. A more broad and sweeping thoroughfare, in the Continental manner, was opened between the Strand and Holborn, and called Kingsway. The phrase will serve for a symbol. Through all those creative and characteristic epochs, there was no King’s Way through London. There was nothing Napoleonic; no roads that could be properly decorated with his victories, or properly cleared with his cannon. It had something of the licence and privilege of that Alsatia that was its sore; the little impenetrable kingdom of rascals that revelled down in Whitefriars, where now rascals of a more mournful kind write Imperialist newspapers. One might call mediaeval London a rabbit warren; save that the Trainbands who took their pikes, and ’prentices who caught up their clubs at a bell or a beacon, were certainly anything but rabbits.