t is the
very figure of whatever fineness the old Anglican culture achieved,
detached, a more dignified and chastened Saint Peter's, colder, greyer,
but still ornate; it has never been over thrown, never disavowed, only
the tall warehouses and all the roar of traffic have forgotten it,
every one has forgotten it; the steamships, the barges, go heedlessly by
regardless of it, intricacies of telephone wires and poles cut blackly
into its thin mysteries, and presently, when in a moment the traffic
permits you and you look round for it, it has dissolved like a cloud
into the grey blues of the London sky.

And then the traditional and ostensible England falls from you
altogether. The third movement begins, the last great movement in the
London symphony, in which the trim scheme of the old order is altogether
dwarfed and swallowed up. Comes London Bridge, and the great warehouses
tower up about you, waving stupendous cranes, the gulls circle and
scream in your ears, large ships lie among their lighters, and one is
in the port of the world. Again and again in this book I have written
of England as a feudal scheme overtaken by fatty degeneration and
stupendous accidents of hypertrophy.

For the last time I must strike that note as the memory of the dear
neat little sunlit ancient Tower of London lying away in a gap among the
warehouses comes back to me, that little accumulation of buildings so
provincially pleasant and dignified, overshadowed by the vulgarest,
most typical exploit of modern England, the sham Gothic casings to the
ironwork of the Tower Bridge. That Tower Bridge is the very balance and
confirmation of Westminster's dull pinnacles and tower. That sham Gothic
bridge; in the very gates of our mother of change, the Sea!

But after that one is in a world of accident and nature. For the third
part of the panorama of London is beyond all law, order, and precedence;
it is the seaport and the sea. One goes down the widening reaches
through a monstrous variety of shipping, great steamers, great
sailing-ships, trailing the flags of all the world, a monstrous
confusion of lighters, witches' conferences of brown-sailed barges,
wallowing tugs, a tumultuous crowding and jostling of cranes and spars,
and wharves and stores, and assertive inscriptions. Huge vistas of dock
open right and left of one, and here and there beyond and amidst it all
are church towers, little patches of indescribably old-fashioned and
worn-out houses,