London Impressions: Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure

								

are almost white, and in this light-grey London, colourless but clear, you
realise how much man darkens and blackens the earth in these latitudes by
his mere presence. The natural surface of the world, it seems, is rather
blond than dark; the quarry is white, and the harvest bright; with which
agrees the delicate, high, and sensitive soft colour of the body. It is a
pity that mere black, brown, and grey dyes should so change the colour of
the race--squalid dyes, in which are steeped the unchanged and the
unwashed garments of these quite innumerable young men. It may be noted
that the great majority of the London Sunday women are fresh to see. We
all know that there are alleys and corners where the women look otherwise,
but those who take their part in this Sunday, so famous in allusions, who
join in the day-long movement on foot and load the tramcars, are clean and
cleanly clad. In Shoreditch and along the out-stretching Kingsland Road
the all-brilliant sun strikes flashes from white dresses and gilds fair
hair attractively arranged. This is one of the surprises of the journey.
Another surprise is that you fall in love with the City steeples, and find
it dull to pass out of their influence of serenity and fancy to come
amongst the Gothic towers and spires of the suburbs. These last are
studious and consistent, properly retrospective, and full of principle and
history. Moreover, they are well seen, for they stand in the wide dwarf
town, with nothing of their own measure except the Board Schools. All the
shabbier suburbs are dwarfs, and none drop so suddenly and go so near the
ground as the suburbs of the north-east. But there are too many Gothic
towers; whereas of the lovely spires of Wren and of his followers we shall
have no more. No one, it seems, plots to recapture that signal
inspiration, so delicate, so inventive, so full of dignity and freaks.
Nothing is quite so beautiful as the spire of Bow, but it must be
permitted to admire a slender steeple in Shoreditch, and one close to the
Blue-Coat School, the much less ingenious one by the Post Office, even
the prankish one near the Mansion House, besides the beautiful St. Mary's
in the Strand, and the only less charming St. Clement Danes. And all these
lily-like spires have kept, more or less, their paleness in the smirched
and spotted town. They are fine against all the London skies, and never
more beautiful than with a bright grey sky, and the half-sunshine of a
characteristic London day on their happy little cupolas and small and
exquisite columns, except, perhaps, when a westering sun makes their white
a golden rose. St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate, has but a squat spire, set with
flourishing little urns; but it has many trees tossing in the summer wind,
and in its garden a fountain where the pigeons and sparrows bathe
together. Across the geraniums and lobelias of another quadrangle, full of
sun and translucent shadow, you may see the gold of the altar-lights, and