make the best of it. Talk of your mountain
distance, your air perspectives! I never saw
anything in the blue gaps of the Apennines more
fairy beautiful than the blue grey fog that turns
the end of a London street as you look down in
it into mystery and beauty, that gives the
present a tinge of the uncertainty of the future
and the past, and throws a halo of poetry over
Gower-street or Soho. And look now how the
London sunshine falls in a white luminous veil,
such as hid the face of Moses before that vulgar
block of houses in Blue Ruin-street: two pawn-
brokers, a publican's, and an undertaker's. That
white fog of glory slants across the end of the
street, where the cab No. 3174 is breaking
through it, like a new Jacob's ladder, the cords,
golden threads of sunbeams, let down in gracious
mercy once more to allow some poor suffering life-
burdened wretch to crawl up it to the Bright
City. Why, it is a complete angelic exhibition,
and should be charged for. It is worth a guinea a
seat, yet no one looks up; no one but that poor
little skeleton girl with a frozen bunch of yesterday's
water-cresses in her lean hand, who huddles
in the doorway of Lattat, the sharp attorney,
who (brute) is, actually as I speak, tapping
at the glass to bid her go away. See,
too, you purblind artist with the microscope
eyes, who can find nothing to paint in this our
dear London— the darker bar that strikes like a
giant's sword-blade through the great woof  of
cobweb sunshine we speak of— can't imagine
where it comes from? Oh, Macguelp, thou
mole-eyed misuser of unpaid-for pigments, dost
thou not see that it is the shadow of the chimney
above us, which, standing in the way of the royal
blessed purifying sunshine that brings hope and
gladness into the very eyes of the dying,
enfeebles and dims that path of darkness. Talk
of Samarcand and your Chinese splendour! Is it
not gorgeous to see how the sunshine glistens on
those great gold letters, "BARCLAY, PERKINS,
& Co.," that are heraldically displayed on the
great board above the publican's (Drugger's)
garret window at "The Fivealls," and makes
them shine like letters hewn out of solid bullion?

Well, that white sunshine and that blue fog
at the end of London streets are the first things I
should paint if Providence had made me a London
Claude, as Turner, the barber's son in Maiden-
lane, might have been. The next thing I should
paint would be the magic and enchantment of a
London night, if paint there could be ground
from metals or jewels to do it. Would not I
"go in," as my old friend Macguelp calls it, for
those ladders of lamps, those shot lines of stars,
those bridges of light, which turn London at night
into a perpetual Pekin at lantern carnival time?
What is Rome and the " Moccoli" to it? Go
and walk to-night up Piccadilly, and see the
lamps before you trying to tell your fortune by
shaping themselves into perspective letters and
words, all beginning with A. Look at them
across the Park, like so many spark-stars breaking
out in paper just consumed. See the gilded
trinkets of the illuminated jewellers' shops, the
colours, the rarities, the wonders, the steam
mouse-traps, the air-pumps for opening oysters.
Observe the dark pool of shadow, where the
lamplight does not reach the tree shadows of the
lamp-post; the gutters, running with blood,
where the chemist's crimson beacon light sheds
baleful influence; see all this, and go and paint
what you see, wiping out all smirking, trim
peasants and perennial flower-girls; eternise,
Macguelp, the cyclopic grandeur (however ugly
or misshaped it be) of London!

I was determined to ransack and re-rummage
the poetry and associations of that old street of the
benevolent French saint, from the great porticoed
church with the giant sooty pillars, that somebody
seems to have begun painting with Indian-ink and
left unfinished; from the broad square with the
Spanish name of glorious memory, where the poodle
lion stretches out his wiry tail, guarding
Northumberland House; and from the silver-plumed
fountains, waving, banner-like, in the wind, that seems
to try contemptuously to blow them away
altogether; up northwards, to Long-acre; up beyond
the turn leading to that old church in Covent-
garden, where Charles the Second's favourite
author, Butler, who wrote Hudibras, sleeps,
undisturbed by the jar of the early morning
carts from the market gardens. It is a little
too late in the year to see the chesnuts roasting
over the night-shade tins, pierced with fiery
holes, that the rushlights of our youth used to
burn dimly and penitentially in; but there
is one of those Amazonian old Irishwomen, in
a bygone coachman's many-caped coat, sitting
patient and stubborn as a look-out man in the
"crow's-nest" of a whaler: her red and green
apples, greasy with rubbing, arranged in decent
pyramids; the cocoa-nut well watered; the
oranges judiciously thrown out by a background
of traditionary blue paper.

I did not choose the night for my note-
taking stroll: but I set out for St. Martin's-
lane— the Grub-street of our early painters— a
pleasant April morning, in the boyhood of one
of those days when we count the hours by the
number of the rainbows.

A slight, quick, fervid shower— tears more of
happiness brimming over than anger breaking
its bounds— had just fallen, and pricked the
dry grey pavement into a dark lace pattern of
spots, out of which you could select the newest
by their being sharper in outline and darker
than the rest. The aristocracy of five minutes
ago, and the parvenus of the last moment alike,
as the soft warm rain fell now quicker and more
petulantly passionate, melting one into the
other, losing shape, plan, and purpose, as the
stone washed luminous brown, and transparent
as slabs of Cairngorm agate.

I am glad it was not one of those gusty days
of early March, when the brown dust, dry and
pungent as pepper, runs before you in a long
trailing thread, as if it were leading one by a fairy
clue to some fairy labyrinth, or blows in strange
semicircles, that try to diagram themselves
and form ground plans on the dry, clean, cold
pavement. There were no stray MS. bits of
paper blowing about like sybilline leaves, or