The amazing metropolitan atmosphere in which I found myself satisfied me completely for the time being. Life here was so complex and so extended that during days and days that involved visits--breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, suppers--with one personage and another, political, social, artistic, I was still busy snatching glimpses of the great lake of life that spread on every hand. In so far as I could judge on so short a notice, London seemed to me to represent a mood--a uniform, aware, conservative state of being, neither brilliant nor gay anywhere, though interesting always. About Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, Charing Cross, and the Strand I suppose the average Londoner would insist that London is very gay; but I could not see it. Certainly it was not gay as similar sections in New York are gay. It is not in the Londoner himself to be so. He is solid, hard, phlegmatic, a little dreary, like a certain type of rain-bird or Northern loon, content to make the best of a rather dreary situation. On the other hand, I should not say that the city is depressing,--far from it,--though there are many who have told me they found it so. You have to represent a certain state of mind to be a Londoner, or a Britisher, even, a true one, and, on the whole, I think it is a more pleasant attitude than one finds in America, though not so brilliant. Creature comforts run high with this type of mind, and, after that, a certain happy acceptance of the commonplace. Nothing less than that could possibly explain the mile on mile of drab houses, of streets all alike, of doorways all alike, of chimneys all alike. That is what you feel all over England--a drab acceptance of the commonplace; and yet, when all is said and done, it works out into something so charming in its commonplaceness that it is almost irresistible. All the while I was in London I was never tired of looking at these dreary streets and congratulating myself that they composed so well. I do not wonder that Whistler found much to admire at Chelsea or that Turner could paint Thames water-scenes. I could, too, if I were an artist. As it was, I could see Goldsmith and Lamb and Gray and Dickens and much of Shakspere in all that I saw here. It must be the genius of the English people to be homy and simple, and yet charmingly idyllic in their very lack of imagination. It must be so.