Excerpt from A Londoner's London

Preface, he said, always put him in mind of Hamlet's exclamation to the tardy player, Leave thy damnable faces, and begin 1 I delay to begin only to explain that the London of these pages is not the measureless town of the guide-books: that London on which a hundred and fifty years ago Horace Walpole began a book, only to faint and fail: that London which, still earlier, had been called a county covered with houses, a description which has passed from metaphor to fact. The Londoner's true London is smaller. It is the sum of his own tracks in the maze, the town in which, by hap, he has most often eaten his bread and thought his thoughts. Samuel Butler remarks in his published note-books that he was more in Fetter Lane than in any other street of London, and that Lincoln's Inn Fields, the British Museum, the Strand, Fleet Street, and the Embank ment came next. This is a very small London, to which my own adds the City, the northern suburbs, and those more national regions of Westminster and the Parks which may be called Everyman's. Although.

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