ges of Romance--The Henry James Heroes and
Heroines--George William Curtiss's "Prue and I"--Edgar Fawcett and Edgar
Saltus--The "Big Four" of Archibald Clavering Gunter--The Home of Dr.
Sloper--O. Henry and Arthur Train--Bunner and Washington
Square--"Predestined"--The De Rham House and Van Bibber's
Burglar--Delmonico's--The "Amen Corner"--Union and Madison Squares--The
Coming of Potash and Perlmutter--Up the Avenue.

To Macaulay's New Zealander, contemplating from London Bridge the ruins
of St. Paul's, and the miles upon miles of silent stones stretching to
north and west and east, there would undoubtedly have come the desire to
reconstruct a mental picture of the vast, dead city in certain of the
various periods in which it had been teeming and throbbing with human
life. Had the wish become the task, formal history would have played its
part. Informal history would have proved more fruitful, and bygone days
would have taken shape in the study of old prints, letters, and diaries.
But for the full flavour of the town that once was and now had become
crumbling dust he would have turned to pages that had been professedly
pages of romance.

Suppose Elizabethan London had been his especial interest. That he
would have seen through the eyes of Sir John Falstaff and his riotous,
dissolute cronies of the Boar's Head Tavern. Georgian London? What
better companion could he have had in his scheme of investigation than
Mr. Thomas Jones, recently come up from the West Country? For a vision
of Corinthian London could he have done better than take up Conan
Doyle's "Rodney Stone," with its vivid pictures of the stilted
eccentrics who hovered about the Prince-Regent, the coffee-houses
thronged with England's warriors of the land and sea, and the haunts of
the hard-faced men of the Prize Ring?

The Artful Dodger, guiding the innocent Oliver to the den of Fagin the
Jew, would have introduced that last New Zealander to the sordid section
of London about Great Saffron Hill and Little Saffron Hill that existed
before the construction of the Holborn Viaduct. In the pages of
Thackeray and George Meredith he would have studied the West-End of
Victorian days. Certain seamy aspects of London life of the last years
of the nineteenth century would have been revealed in the novels of
George Gissing; and the books of a score of scribes, whose permanent
place in letters is still a matter of conjecture, would have flashed
glimpses of the city's s