Fleet Street would not be its moments of stately architecture, but its
moments of fog or mist, when its meanest architecture would show
stately. The city won its moving grandeur from the throng of people
astir on its pavements, or the streams of vehicles solidifying or
liquefying in its streets. The august groups of Westminster and
Parliament did not seem in themselves spectacular; they needed the
desertedness of night, and the pour of the moon into the comparative
emptiness of the neighborhood, to fill them out to the proportions of
their keeping in the memory. Is Trafalgar Square as imposing as it has
the chance of being? It is rather scattered and spotty, and wants
somehow the magic by which Paris moves the spirit in the Place de la
Concorde, or Edinburgh stirs the soul with its suggestions of old
steel-engravings of Athens. Of course St. Paul's has a prodigious
opportunity, as the multitudinous omnibuses roll their tide towards its
facade, but it is not equal to its opportunity. Bit for bit, there is
not quite any bit in London like that edifice of smutted Greek on which
the newly arrived American looks from his breakfast-table in his
Liverpool hotel, and realizes that he is in England. I am far from
thinking the black of the coal-smoke a disadvantage to the London
architecture. Pure white marble is all very well, and the faint rose
that the stone takes from a thousand years of Italian sunsets is not
bad; but the black blur on the surfaces of St. Paul's lends wall and
dome and pillar a depth of shadow which only the electric glare of
tropic suns can cast. The smoke enriches the columns which rise, more or
less casually as it seems, from the London streets and squares, and one
almost hates to have it cleaned off or painted under on the fronts of
the aristocratic mansions. It is like having an old picture restored;
perhaps it has to be done, but it is a pity.

The aristocratic mansions themselves, the hundreds of large houses of