bind them is wholly in the mind, and depends merely upon association, but it is very strong upon anyone who has grown up from childhood into middle age surrounded by the vision of this town; and it would seem as though London was only London because of those rough surfaces of soft stonework, streaked with white wedges, scaling off the grime of St. Martin’s, or St. Clement Dane’s, or the fine front of the Admiralty, and standing out clear against the general brown mass of the streets. The quite new things have no character at all. One wonders what cosmopolitan need can have produced them. London never produced them, with their stone that so often is plaster, and their alien suggestion of whatever is least national in Paris or New York. London never produced them. The noise of the streets in spite of every change remains the same, it is the same comforting and distant roar, like the roar of large waters among hills, which every visitor has noticed, with its sharp contrast to the rattle and cries of other great capitals. Why it should be so no one, I think, has discovered, though many have described it, but it remains an unmistakable thing, and if a London man, who had travelled and was far away, should be set down by a spirit in London, not knowing where he was, when he heard through a window high above the street this distant and continuous roar, he would know that he had come home. It should surely in theory have disappeared, this chief physical characteristic of the great place, yet neither the new electricity and the hissing of the wires, nor the new paving, nor even the new petrol seem to change it. It is still a confused and powerful and subdued voice, like a multitude undecided. The silence also does not change. The way in which in countless spots you pass through an unobserved low passage, or through an inconspicuous narrow turning, and find yourself in a deserted place, from which the whole life of London seems blanketed out, has been to every traveller and to every native part of the charm and surprise of London. Dickens knew it very well, and makes of it again and again a dramatic something in his work which stamps it everywhere with the soul of London. In every decade men growing older deplore the disappearance of this or that sanctuary of isolation and silence, but in the aggregate they never disappear; something in the very character of the people reproduces them continually, and if any man will borrow the leisure--even a man who knows his London well--to peer about and to explore for one Saturday afternoon in one square mile of older London, how many such unknown corners will he not find! The populace also upon whom all this is founded remain the same.