don was once that it was not a great city
but a great village. It was a little town, widespread; and until the
raising of some of the best of the new buildings on the left bank, there
was nothing conspicuously fine to contradict the village character except
Somerset House. The great stations and the busy Gothic of the Houses of
Parliament were not influential enough for this. Now, however, it is
somewhat different. Two buildings at least in the line of new hotels and
offices seem good enough to make rules. They are not of the dignity of
Somerset House, but they will serve. For a space, then, where they stand,
the village-London is done away. And only for a village-London, a London
keeping its own distinctive character, would a broken, accidental, muddy
shore, with its tidal rhythm of mud and wave, be fit. This left bank at
least is, for a space, _grande ville_. We cannot altogether grudge its
Embankment.

[Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER, WESTMINSTER.]

But if there is a mile of London village left--and therefore of the most
London-like London--it is at Chelsea. The reason of the County Council's
heart, even, ought to confess thus much. And the village-character is in
its vitality on the curving foreshore of this long Reach. A great part of
the district near is a village of yesterday, and mean enough, but the
river-side of wharf and barge and tidal change is a village river-side of
long ago. It is lowly enough, not mean at all. It is the scene of business
as old as civilisation; man-power and horse-power, and the movement of
wind and water, seem to do the greater part of the work among them. It is
the counterpart of spade cultivation on the Jersey _coteaux_, though this
is all river and that all earth; but both are simple. The chimneys on the
right bank are a long way off, the gasworks higher up are out of sight.
You can forget the great bridges down stream; and looking towards the
light the view is animating.

Inasmuch as the Thames flows here north-eastward, when you look to the
south-west by Chelsea Reach, in the early afternoon of windy spring, you
look at once towards the gates of light, the gates of the wind, and the
gates of the river. There seems to be one sole spring and source in the
day. The way is, beyond description, open. For the waterway is the flat of
the world, and everywhere else in London are houses; here is a real
horizon. Here you get the proportions of a great sky, as you get the
proportions of