living at all. He is no true citizen who
merely comes up to town 'for the season,' alternating the pleasures of
town with those of the country; he alone is the true citizen who _must_
live amid the roar of the street all the year round, and for years
together. If I could choose for myself I would even now choose the
life of pleasant alternation between town and country, because I am
persuaded that the true piquancy and zest of all pleasures lies in
contrast. But fate orders these things for us, and takes no account of
our desires, unless it be to treat them with habitual irony. At
five-and-twenty the plain fact met me--that I must needs live in
London, because my bread could be earned nowhere else. No choice was
permitted me; I must go where crowds were, because from the favour or
necessities of such crowds I must gather the scanty tithes which put
food upon my table and clothes upon my back. When eminent writers,
seated at ample desks, from which they command fair views of open
country, denounce with prophetic fervour the perils which attend the
growth of cities, they somewhat overlook the fact that the growth of
cities is a sequence, alike ineluctable and pitiless, of the modern
struggle for existence. One cannot be a lawyer, or a banker, a
physician or a journalist, without neighbours. He can scarce be a
literary man in perfect sylvan solitude, unless his work is of such
quality--perhaps I should have said such popularity--that it wins for
him immediate payment, or unless his private fortune be such that he
can pursue his aims as a writer with entire indifference to the
half-yearly statements of his publisher. In respect of the various
employments of trade and commerce, the case is still plainer. Men must
needs go where the best wages may be earned; and under modern
conditions of life it is as natural that population should flow toward
cities, as that rivers should seek the sea. These matters will be more
particularly discussed later on; it is enough for me to explain at
present that I was one of those persons for whom life in a city was an
absolute necessity.

It is not until one is tied to a locality that its defects become
apparent. A street that interests the mind by some charm of populous
vivacity when it is traversed at random and without object, becomes
inexpressibly wearisome when it is the thoroughfare of daily duty. My
daily duty took me through a long stretch of Oxford Street, which is a
str