Strange that the wealthiest class in the wealthiest country in the world should so long have been content to inhabit a squalid village!

I\'m not going to compare London, as Englishmen often do, with Paris or Vienna. I won\'t do two great towns that gross injustice. And, indeed, comparison here is quite out of the question. You don\'t compare Oxford with Little Peddlington, or Edinburgh with Thrums, and then ask which is the handsomest. Things must be alike in kind before you can begin to compare them. And London and Paris are not alike in kind. One is a city, and a noble city; the other is a village, and a squalid village.

No; I will not even take a humbler standard of comparison, and look at London side by side with Brussels, Antwerp, Munich, Turin. Each of those is a city, and a fine city in its way; but each of them is small. Still, even by their side, London is again but a squalid village. I insist upon that point, because, misled by their ancient familiarity with London, most Englishmen have had their senses and understandings so blunted on this issue, that they really don\'t know what is meant by a town, or a fine town, when they see one. And don\'t suppose it\'s because London is in Britain and these other towns out of it that I make these remarks: for Bath is a fine town, Edinburgh is a fine town, even Glasgow and Newcastle are towns, while London is still a straggling, sprawling, invertebrate, inchoate, overgrown village. I am as free, I hope, from anti-patriotic as from patriotic prejudice. The High Street in Oxford, Milsom Street in Bath, Princes Street in Edinburgh, those are all fine streets that would attract attention even in France or Germany. But the Strand, Piccadilly, Regent Street, Oxford Street—good Lord, deliver us!

One more caveat as to my meaning. When I cite among real towns Brussels, Antwerp, and Munich, I am not thinking of the treasures of art those beautiful places contain; that is another and altogether higher question. Towns supreme in this respect often lag far behind others of less importance—lag behind in those external features and that general architectural effectiveness which rightly entitle us to say in a broad sense, "This is a fine city." Florence, for example, contains more treasures of art in a small space than any other town of Europe; yet Florence, though undoubtedly a town, and even a fine town, is not to be compared in this respect, I do not say with Venice or Brussels, but even with Munich or Milan. On the other hand, London contains far more treasures of art in its way than Boston, Massachusetts; but Boston is a handsome, well-built, regular town, while London—well, I will spare you the further repetition of the trite truism that London is a squalid village. In one word, the point I am seeking to bring out here is that a town, as a town, is handsome or otherwise, not in virtue of the works of art or antiquity it contains, but in virtue of its ground-plan, its architecture, its external and visible decorations and places—the Louvre, the Boulevards, the Champs Elysées, the Place de l\'Opéra.

Now London has no ground-plan. It has no street architecture. It has no decorations, though it has many uglifications. It is frankly and simply and ostentatiously hideous. And being wholly wanting in a system of any sort—in organic parts, in idea, in views, in vistas—it is only a village, and a painfully uninteresting one.

Most Englishmen see London before they see any other great town. They become so familiarised with it that their sense of comparison is dulled and blunted. I had the good fortune to have seen many other great towns before I ever saw London: and I shall never forget my first sense of surprise at its unmitigated ugliness.

Get on top of an omnibus—I don\'t say in Paris, from the Palais Royal to the Arc de Triomphe, but in Brussels, from the Gare du Nord to the Palais de Justice—and what do you see? From end to end one unbroken succession of noble and open prospects. I\'m not thinking now of the Grande Place in the old town, with its magnificent collection of medi?val buildings; the Great Fire effectively deprived us of our one sole chance of such an element of beauty in modern London. I confine myself on purpose to the parts of Brussels which are purely recent, and might have been imitated at a distance in London, if there had been any public spirit or any public body in England to imitate them. (But unhappily there was neither.) Recall to mind as you read the strikingly handsome street view that greets you as you emerge from the............