Where is
there another novelist who has so peopled a great city with his
imaginary characters that there is hardly room for the living
population, as one walks along the ways?
O these streets of London! There are other more splendid shades in
them,--shades that have been there for centuries, and will walk
beside us so long as the streets exist. One can never see these
shades, save as one goes on foot, or takes that chariot of the
humble, the omnibus. I should like to make a map of literary London
somewhat after Leigh Hunt's plan, as projected in his essay on the
World of Books; for to the book-lover 'the poet's hand is always on
the place, blessing it.' One can no more separate the association
from the particular spot than one can take away from it any other
beauty.
'Fleet Street is always Johnson's Fleet Street' (so Leigh Hunt
says); 'the Tower belongs to Julius Caesar, and Blackfriars to
Suckling, Vandyke, and the Dunciad. . .I can no more pass through
Westminster without thinking of Milton, or the Borough without
thinking of Chaucer and Shakespeare, or Gray's Inn without calling
Bacon to mind, or Bloomsbury Square without Steele and Akenside,
than I can prefer brick and mortar to wit and poetry, or not see a
beauty upon it beyond architecture in the splendour of the
recollection.'
Chapter X.
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