And this leads me to my conclusion. The Weald will never be conquered. It will always be the Weald. To be conquered is to suffer the will of another: the Weald will suffer no will but its own. The men of the Weald drive out men odious to them in manner sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal, always in the long run successful. Economics break against the Weald as water breaks against stone. It is not a long walk from London. Your Londoner in summer comes and builds in it. So foreign birds their nests. But unlike the foreign birds, he does not return with each returning spring. For the Weald will welcome the bird for the pleasure the bird gives it, and drive it out when the pleasure is done. Now it welcomes the Londoner for his money, and this feature in the Londoner is not recurrent with the seasons. Here is some Latin which I am assured is grammatical and correctly spelled as well: Stat et stabit: manet et manebit, spectator orbis. She stands and still shall stand; she remains and shall remain: a watcher of the generations. On London and the Houses in it The aspect of London, as the man who knows it grows older, begins to take on characters of permanence and characters of change, both of which are comparable to those of a human life. It is perceived that certain qualities in the great soul of the place are permanent, and that the memories of many common details merge after the passage of years into a general picture which is steadfast and gives unity to the whole. This is especially true of the London skies, and more true, I think, of the London skies in autumn than at any other season of the year. Men go home from the City or from the Courts westward at an hour which is that of sunset, when the river catches more light than at any other time: the mixture of mist and smoke and of those shapes in our clouds, beyond the reek of the town, which are determined by the south-west wind blowing up the line of the valley, make together an impression which is the most lasting of the landscapes in which we live. These it was which inspired Turner when he drew them from the deserted room in the tower of Battersea Church, or from that corner house over the River, whence he could watch evening after evening the heavy but transparent colours which enter into the things he painted. Many foreigners, caught by the glamour of that artist, have missed the source whence his mellow and declining sunlight was inspired; its source was in these evening and autumn skies of London. There is a permanence also in the type of home which London built for more than two centuries, and which was laid down after the Great Fire, and there is a permanence in the older stonework. It is difficult or impossible to define what there is in common between the brown stock brick of London, which is the stuff of all its background whether of large houses or mean, and the black and white weathering of Portland stone. Perhaps the unity which seems to