egarding us, whom
she tortures, with a sort of indifference, if not contempt.

And yet she is ours after all; she belongs to us, is more perhaps our
very likeness and self than the capital of any other people. What is
Berlin but a brutalised village, or Paris now but cosmopolis, or Rome
but a universe? She is ours, the very gate of England of my heart. For
she stands there striding the boundary of my country, the greatest of
our cities, the greatest even of our industrial cities--a negative to
all the rest. To the North she says Nay continually, for she is
English, the greater successor of Winchester, and in her voice is the
soul of the South, the real England, the England of my heart.

Ah, we have never known her or loved her enough or understood that she
is a universe, without the self-consciousness of lesser things or the
prepared beauty of mortal places. Indeed, she has something of the
character of the sea which is our home, its changefulness, its
infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life that traverses it.
Almost featureless if you will, she is always under the guidance of
her ample sky, responding immediately to every mood of the clouds; and
in her, beauty grows up suddenly out of life and is gone e'er we can
apprehend it....

But to come into Southwark on a Spring morning in search of Chaucer
and the Tabard Inn is to ask of London more than she will give you. It
is strange, seeing that she is so English, that for her the living are
more than the dead. Consider England, southern England, if you know
her well enough, and remember what in the face of every other country
of Europe she has conserved of the past in material and tangible
things--roads, boundaries, churches, houses, and indeed whole towns
and villages. Yet London has so little of her glory and her past about
her in material things, that it is often only by her attitude to life
you might know she is not a creation of yesterday. It is true the fire
of 1666 destroyed almost all, but apparently it did not destroy the
Tabard Inn, which nevertheless is gone--it and its successors.

Something remained that should have been sacred, not indeed from
Chaucer's day but at least from that of the Restoration, something
that was beautiful, till some forty years ago. All is gone now; of the
old Inn as we may see it in a drawing of 1810, a two-storied building
with steepish roofs of tiles, dormer windows and railed balconies
supported below by pillars of stone,