After a few days I went to London for the first time,--I do not count the night of my arrival, for I saw nothing but the railway terminus,--and, I confess, I was not greatly impressed. I could not help thinking on this first morning, as we passed from Paddington, via Hyde Park, Grosvenor Square, Berkeley Square, Piccadilly, and other streets to Regent Street and the neighborhood of the Carlton Hotel, that it was beautiful, spacious, cleanly, dignified, and well ordered, but not astonishingly imposing. Fortunately, it was a bright and comfortable morning, and the air was soft. There was a faint, bluish haze over the city, which I took to be smoke; and certainly it smelled as though it were smoky. I had a sense of great life, but not of crowded life, if I manage to make myself clear by that. It seemed to me at first blush as if the city might be so vast that no part was important. At every turn, X. was my ever-present monitor. We must have passed through a long stretch of Piccadilly, for X. pointed out a line of clubs, naming them the St. James’s Club, the Savile Club, the Lyceum Club, and then St. James’s Palace. I was duly impressed. I was seeing things which, after all, I thought, did not depend so much upon their exterior beauty or vast presence as upon the distinction of their lineage and connections. They were beautiful in a low, dark way, and certainly they were tinged with an atmosphere of age and respectability. After all, since life is a figment of the brain, such built-up notions of things are in many cases really far more impressive than the things themselves. London is a fanfare of great names; it is a clatter of vast reputations; it is a swirl of memories and celebrated beauties and orders and distinctions. It is almost impossible any more to disassociate the real from the fictitious or, better, the spiritual. There is something here which is not of brick and stone at all, but which is purely a matter of thought. It is disembodied poetry, noble ideas, delicious memories of great things; and these, after all, are better than brick and stone. The city is low, generally not more than five stories high, often not more than two, but it is beautiful. And it alternates great spaces with narrow crevices in such a way as to give a splendid variety. You can have at once a sense of being very crowded and of being very free. I can understand now Browning’s desire to include “poor old Camberwell” with Italy in the confines of romance. [Illustration: Drawn by W. J. Glackens “X. WAS MY EVER-PRESENT MONITOR”]