Take up this map of the Metropolis,
published last year, and glance at that little
kernel, coloured scarlet, called the City, and
then at the prodigious extent of Nutshell
surrounding it,  all loudly demanding, (and
meriting) to be included in the general title
"London."   Yet this little scarlet kernel, with
some scattered streets about Westmonasterian
marshes, was the whole of London once.
It was big enough to give laws to all
England, and to great part of France, for
hundreds of years.  It was big enough to hold
a Lombard Street; which, even then, stood in
no unfavourable degree of comparison with a
China orange.  It was big enough to have
Lord Mayors who bearded Kings;  to be a
constant source of anxiety and uneasiness to
the Sovereign;  to be the philosopher's stone
of Jack Cade's ambition;  to be, as it alway
nutshell?   How small the kernel looks, with
his rubicund boundary!   Throw in Westminster
and Southwark, as the three appear
in Hollar's print: how diminutive they are
with the big nutshell around!  Take a map
of London, hydrographed even within the
memory of man—within thirty years let us
say—the nutshell has still the best of it, and
the kernel shrinks woefully, even amidst its
layers upon layers of cuticle.

The prodigious enlargement of London
seems more to me in the act of the country
closing round the town, than of the town
advancing on the country—more as a giant
hand gradually closes up its Titanic fingers
on a shrivelled dwarf, than as the dwarf
growing into the giant, and throwing up
earthheaps in its struggle for emancipation from
the parent monster.  The fat has grown
round the heart, and the heart has grown
torpid and sluggish in the midst. Do you
think it is that scarlet kernel—once the whole
City of London—that has pushed out mandibles,
crab-like feelers, on every side, and,
cancer-like, has spread over the green fields
and shady lanes?  Do you think the kernel
is the spider, and Westminster and Southwark
the web? It may be so; but I rather
incline to the theory that the advancement
is towards, and not from, the kernel. That
is why I call it an invasion: and the invasion
seems to me gradually but surely
driving, into a constantly diminishing circle,
all sorts of old abuses, old nuisances, old
vested interests, old  "time-honoured
institutions,"  towards the shrivelled old kernel,
which, though she knows  (excuse the gender)
she might be rid of them by the aërial
locomotive of progress, seeks rather
(happily impotently)  to cause them to permeate
through sewers into healthier streams, poisoning
them meanwhile;  or she would strenuously
seek  (always impotently)  to cast them,
as so much guano, on to the invader's fields
around her,  where they would produce a nice
rich crop of gingerbread coaches, men in
brass, prejudice, dirt, water-bailiffs, overdriven
bullocks, choked sewers, reeking
slaughter-houses, and coal and corn committees.
What will the nut-shell do? Will its
invasion, hugging, in boa-constrictor fashion,
the old, musty, shrivelled, yet wealthy kernel,
hug it into better shape?  or will it crush it
and cause it to collapse entirely;  forcing it,
by some hidden phoenix process of its own,
to reproduction in another guise to entire
rejuvenescence?

It is natural for large cities to grow larger.
Pine-apples grow;  so do little boys, and
lawyers'  bills of costs—why not capitals?
The little island of St. Louis once held all
there was of Paris. Vienna has outgrown
its glacis; Madrid, Naples, Venice, have all
grown;  and Constantinople—no;  for
Constantinople will be to me always a mystery,
even as Smyrna is. They are always being
burnt down, yet never seem to get smaller or
larger.  But London has not grown in any
natural, reasonable, understandable way.
It hasn't grown bigger consistently. It hasn't
increased by degrees, like the pine-apple or
the little boy.  The lawyer's bill may be a
little more like it;  for, like that dreadful
document,  it has swollen with frightful,
alarming, supernatural rapidity.  It has
taken you unawares;  it has dropped upon
you without warning;  it has started up without
notice;  it has grown with stealthy rapidity,
from a mouse into a mastodon.

Thirty years ago!—Boney the first, had
just finished eating his heart on a rock.
Thistlewood and others had been decapitated.
A grave judicial discussion had not
long before been closed as to whether a
murderer and ravisher had a right to the
"appeal by battle."  The Old Bailey Monday
morning performances yet took place before
crowded and unfashionable audiences. Samuel
Hayward had just been hanged for burglary,
and Fauntleroy was yet to suffer for forgery;
women were yet whipped for larceny;  and
George, the gentleman of gentlemen, was
king.  There were no railroads, and no
police, save the red-coated Bow Street runners
and the purblind old watchmen. There
were no coffee-shops, no reading-rooms; and
the coffee-houses were taverns resorted to
(in the paucity of clubs)  by the nobility and
gentry.  It was considered aristocratic to
beat the watch;  it was esteemed " Corinthian"
to get drunk in the purlieus of Drury Lane;
it was very  "tip-top"  to patronise a
prize-fighter.   We have been invaded by
manners and customs somewhat different
since the gentleman of gentlemen was king.

Concerning the brick-and-mortar invasion:
There was no Regent's Park, no Victoria
Park, no Belgravia, and no Tyburnia. Tyburn
Gate, indeed, yet stood where Tyburn
Gallows not so many years before had stood,
and beneath which mouldered the bones of
Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw.  Paddington
was, but it was countryfied;  and the Edgeware
Road was simply a rural road leading