Among the many misfortunes of men confined to this island, in the great cities of it, it may be counted a good fortune that they have, more than most men bound by modern industry, the opportunity of the high places. Lancashire especially has them at its doors, and anyone who will talk much to Lancashire folk will find how greatly the presence of the moors still enters into their lives. Notably is this true of the Peak just to the east of the great industrial plain, and the sense of height and the satisfaction of it is perhaps nowhere more splendidly met than by the spectacle of that plain beneath a winter sunset as one sees it from the height of the road above Glossop, if it be a Sunday evening when the smoke is not dense, because for twenty-four hours the factories have been silent. The smoke then hangs in wreaths like light clouds against the sunset and one perceives in a very marvellous and sudden fashion beneath one the life of industrial England. It is an aspect of the country not easily forgotten. And everywhere Englishmen have presented to them this effect of height within a smaller compass than the men of other European nations. For in the other nations men are either of the mountains or of the plains. But here the isolated and numerous masses of old rocks in Wales, in Cumberland, and just north of the Midlands, and the sharp escarpments of the five ranges of the chalk that radiate from Salisbury Plain, and the isolated ridge of the Malverns, and the wall of the Cotswolds over the Vale of Severn, make it so that nearly all those who live on this island, and especially those who live in the busiest part of it, have their line of hills before them. East Anglia and the Fens are an exception, and much of the Valley of the Thames as well. And here comes in the lack of London. London has no high places. It is the chief misfortune in the aspect of the city. It was not always so. Popular instinct was very powerful here. Since the Surrey hills had not their escarpment turned towards the Thames, and since looking nowhere round could the Londoner get height, he made it for himself, and the Gothic London of the Middle Ages was a mass of spires, chief and glorious above which was the highest spire in all Europe, higher than Strasburg and higher than Cologne, old St. Paul’s. It stood up on its hill above the river, and gave unity to all that scheme of spires below. Neglect began the ruin, the Great Fire did the rest, and height in London has disappeared. The tall houses and narrow gorges of streets that are the characteristic of Paris and of Edinburgh are unknown to London. Here and there the sense of which I speak is satisfied. Coming up Ludgate Hill, for instance, and seeing the mass of St. Paul’s above it, or in one place where, as you come out of a narrow Westminster street, the upshooting of the repetitive lines of Victoria Tower suddenly strike you. But as a whole height is lacking here. Nor in so vast a place, now fixed in