With these sentiments, fancies, and prejudices in favour of the past, joined to a fastidious, quaintly luxurious taste, and limited funds, it is hardly to be wondered at that I have searched long and vainly for my ideal dwelling. I might, perhaps, have found it readily enough in the country, but my habits only allowed me to seek it in town. I am a London man—London born and London bred—a genuine cockney, I hope, of the school of Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb. I cannot tear myself away from old taverns, old courts and alleys, old suburbs (now standing in the very centre of the town), old print-shops, old mansions, old archways, and old churches. I must hear the London chimes at midnight, or life would not be worth a jot. I hear them, as they were heard a century and more ago, for they are the last things to change; but forty or fifty years have played sad havoc with land, and brick, and stone. Fire has done something; metropolitan improvements have done more. Not only do I mourn over what is lost, but what is gained. The town grows newer every day that it grows older. I know it must be so; I know it ought to be so; I know it is a sign of increased prosperity and strength. I see this with one half of my mind, while I abhor it with the other. I cannot love New Oxford Street, while St. Giles’s Church and old Holborn still remain. I have no affection for Bayswater and Notting-hill, but a tender remembrance of Tyburn Gate. I feel no sensation of delight when I hear the name of St. John’s Wood or the Regent’s Park; and Camden Town is a thing of yesterday that I treat with utter contempt. If I allow my footsteps to wander along Piccadilly and through Knightsbridge, they turn down, on one side, into Chelsea, or up, on the other side, into Kensington, leaving Brompton unvisited in the middle. I am never tired of sitting under the trees in Cheyne Walk; of walking round the red bricks and trim gravel pathways of Chelsea Hospital; of peeping through the railings at Gough House, or watching the old Physic Garden from a boat on the river. I am never weary of roaming hand-in-hand with an amiable, gossiping companion, like Leigh Hunt, listening to stories at every doorstep in the old town, and repeopling faded, half-deserted streets with the great and little celebrities of the past. I never consider a day ill spent that has ended in plucking daisies upon Kew Green, or in wasting an hour or two in the cathedral stillness of Charter-House Square. I am fond of tracing resemblances, perhaps imaginary, between Mark Lane and Old Highgate, and of visiting old merchants’ decayed mansions far away in tarry Poplar. I could add a chapter to Leigh Hunt’s pleasant essay upon City trees,[14] and tell of many fountains and flower-gardens that stand under the windows of dusky counting-houses.