und
Railway than in the grand hotels outside the stations. The great palaces
of pleasure which the rich build in London all have brazen and vulgar
names. Their names are either snobbish, like the Hotel Cecil, or
(worse still) cosmopolitan like the Hotel Metropole. But when I go in a
third-class carriage from the nearest circle station to Battersea to the
nearest circle station to the DAILY NEWS, the names of the stations are
one long litany of solemn and saintly memories. Leaving Victoria I come
to a park belonging especially to St. James the Apostle; thence I go to
Westminster Bridge, whose very name alludes to the awful Abbey; Charing
Cross holds up the symbol of Christendom; the next station is called a
Temple; and Blackfriars remembers the mediaeval dream of a Brotherhood.

If you wish to find the past preserved, follow the million feet of the
crowd. At the worst the uneducated only wear down old things by sheer
walking. But the educated kick them down out of sheer culture.

I feel all this profoundly as I wander about the empty railway station,
where I have no business of any kind. I have extracted a vast number of
chocolates from automatic machines; I have obtained cigarettes, toffee,
scent, and other things that I dislike by the same machinery; I have
weighed myself, with sublime results; and this sense, not only of the
healthiness of popular things, but of their essential antiquity and
permanence, is still in possession of my mind. I wander up to the
bookstall, and my faith survives even the wild spectacle of modern
literature and journalism. Even in the crudest and most clamorous
aspects of the newspaper world I still prefer the popular to the proud
and fastidious. If I had to choose between taking in the DAILY MAIL and
taking in the TIMES (the dilemma reminds one of a nightmare), I should
certainly cry out with the whole of my being for the DAILY MAIL. Even
mere bigness preached in a frivolous way is not so irritating as mere
meanness preached in a big and solemn way. People buy the DAILY MAIL,
but they do not believe in it. They do believe in the TIMES, and
(apparently) they do not buy it. But the more the output of paper upon
the modern world is actually studied, the more it will be found to be
in all its essentials ancient and human, like the name of Charing Cross.
Linger for two or three hours at a station bookstall (as I am doing),
and you will find that it gradually takes on the grandeur and historic
al