An interesting speculation might be found in considering the different ways persons have looked on the great aggregate of London. For those of fashion it is little more than an enlarged Grosvenor or Belgrave Square: it has few associations, historical or otherwise; while its “curios” may be useful as a sort of raree-show for the crowd. As the excellent Boswell put it, “I have often amused myself with thinking how different a place London is to different people. They whose narrow minds are contracted to the consideration of some one particular pursuit, view it only through that medium. A politician thinks of it merely as the seat of government in its different departments; a grazier as a vast market for cattle; a mercantile man as a place where a prodigious deal of business is done upon ’Change; a dramatic enthusiast as the grand scene of theatrical entertainments; a man of pleasure as an assemblage of taverns, etc., etc.; but the intellectual man is struck with it as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible.” Stowe, Maitland, Grose, Pennant, Brayley, Leigh Hunt, with J. T. Smith, the author of “Walks in London,” the invaluable Peter Cunningham, and other “guides and friends,” in their dealings with London town seem to have been fascinated by one particular mode of treatment, viz.: the tracking out of all the personages and the social and historical incidents that are connected with particular spots. So diligently has this sort of investigation been pursued that some sort of connection has been established between every modern spot and corner and some great memory. Old houses, old inns, old streets and chambers, have all been thus registered and illustrated by quotations from books of their time. As Leigh Hunt says, “Nor perhaps is there a single spot in London in which the past is not visibly present to us, either in the shape of some old buildings, or at least in the names of the streets, or in which the absence of more tangible memorials may not be supplied by the antiquary. In some parts of it we may go back through the whole English history, perhaps through the history of man, as when we speak of St. Paul’s Churchyard, a place in which you may get the last new novel, and find remains of the ancient Britons and of the sea. There also, in the Cathedral, lie painters, patriots, humorists, the greatest warriors and some of the best men; and there, in St. Paul’s School, was educated England’s epic poet, who hoped that his native country would never forget her privilege of ‘teaching the nations how to live.’”