Gray's Inn are green as of old, the Elizabethanism of Staple Inn is
unchanged, about the cornices of the British Museum the pigeons still
flutter and coo, and the old clocks chime sweetly as of old from their
mysterious stations aloft somewhere in the morning and the evening sky.

Changes, of course, there are. It is easier to telephone in London today
than it was ten years ago--almost as easy as in some little provincial
town in Connecticut. Various minor human conveniences have been
improved. The electric lighting is better. Some of the elevators--I
mean the "lifts"--almost remind one of New York. The problem of "rapid
transit" has been simplified. All which things, however, have nothing to
do with national characteristics, but are now the common property of the
civilized, or rather, I should say, the commercialized, world, and are
probably to be found no less in full swing in Timbuctoo. No one--save,
maybe, the citizens of some small imitative nation--confounds these
things with change, or calls them "progress." The soul of a great old
nation adopts all such contrivances as in the past it has adopted new
weapons, or new modes of conveyance. Only a Hottentot or a Cook's
Tourist can consider such superficial developments as evidences of
"change."

There are, of course, some new theatres--though I have heard of no new
great actor or actress. The old "favourites" still seem to dominate the
play-bills, as they did ten years ago. There is Mr. Hammerstein's Opera
House in the Kingsway. I looked upon it with pathos. Yet, surely, it is
a monument not so much of changing London as of that London which sees
no necessity of change.

In regard to the great new roadways, Kingsway, Aldwych, and the
broadening of the Strand, I have been grateful for the temper which