eet not altogether destitute of some real claim to gaiety and
dignity. At first I was ready to concede this claim, and even to
endorse it with enthusiasm; but from the day when I realised that
Oxford Street conducted me, by a force of inevitable gravitation, to a
desk in an office, I began to loathe it. The eye became conscious of a
hundred defects and incongruities; the tall houses rose like prison
walls; the resounding tumult of the streets seemed like the clamour of
tormented spirits. For the first time I began to understand why
imaginative writers had often likened London to Inferno.

I well remember by what a series of curious expedients I endeavoured to
evade these sensations. The most obvious was altogether to avoid this
glittering and detested thoroughfare by making long detours through the
meaner streets which lay behind it; but this was merely to exchange one
kind of aesthetic misery which had some alleviations for another kind
which had none. Sometimes I endeavoured to contrive a doubtful
exhilaration from the contrast which these meaner streets afforded;
saying to myself, as I pushed my way through the costers' stalls of
Great James Street, 'Now you are exchanging squalor for magnificence.
Be prepared for a surprise.' But the ruse failed utterly, and my mind
laughed aloud at the pitiful imposture. Another device was to create
points of interest, like a series of shrines along a tedious road,
which should present some aspect of allurement. There was a book-shop
here or an art-shop there; yesterday a biography of Napoleon was
exhibited in the one, or a print of Murillo's 'Flight into Egypt,' in
the other; and it is become a matter of speculation whether they were
there to-day. Just as a solitary sailor will beguile the tedium of
empty days at sea by a kind of cribbage, in which the left hand plays
against the right, so I laid odds for and against myself on such
trifles as these, and even went so far as to keep an account of my
successes and my failures. Thus, for a whole month I was interested in
a person quite unknown to me, who wore an obsolete white beaver hat,
appeared punctually at the corner of Bond Street at half-past five in
the afternoon, and spent half an hour in turning over the odd volumes
displayed on the street board of a secondhand-book shop not far from
Oxford Circus. His appearances were so planetary in their regularity
that one might have reckoned time by them. Who he was, or what