XII

TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS


London is so manifold (as I have all along been saying) that it would
be advisable, if one could, to see it in a sort of severalty, and take
it in the successive strata of its unfathomable interest. Perhaps it
could best be visited by a syndicate of cultivated Americans; then one
could give himself to its political or civic interest, another to its
religious memories and associations, another to its literary and
artistic records; no one American, however cultivated, could do justice
to all these claims, even with life and health of an expectation beyond
that of the most uncultivated American. Besides this suggestion I should
like to offer a warning, and this is, that no matter with what devoted
passion the American lover of London approaches her he must not hope for
an exclusive possession of her heart. If she is insurpassably the most
interesting, the most fascinating of all the cities that ever were, let
him be sure that he is not the first to find it out. He may not like it,
but he must reconcile himself to seeing some English rival before him in
devotion to any aspect of her divinity. It is not for nothing that
poets, novelists, historians, antiquarians have been born in England for
so many ages; and not a palm's breadth of her sky, not a foot of her
earth, not a stone or brick of her myriad wallspaces but has been fondly
noted, studied, and described in prose, or celebrated in verse. English
books are full of England, and she is full of Englishmen, whom the
American, come he never so numerously, will find outnumbering him in the
pursuit of any specific charm of hers. In my wanderings otherwhere in
their islands I had occasion to observe how fond the English were of