financial centre, while the cabalistic letters (meaning little
or nothing to the stranger within the gates), E. C., safely comprehend a
region which not only includes "_the city_," but extends as far westward
as Temple Bar, and thus covers, if we except the lapping over into the
streets leading from the Strand, practically the whole of the "Highway of
Letters" of Doctor Johnson's time.

[Illustration: NO. 8 CRAVEN STREET, STRAND.]

[Illustration: MR TULKINGHORN'S HOUSE.]

A novelist to-day, and even so in Dickens' time, did not--nay could
not--give birth to a character which could be truly said to represent the
complex London type. The environment of the lower classes--the east end
and the Boro'--is ever redolent of him, and he of it. The lower-middle or
upper-lower class is best defined by that individual's predilection for
the "good old Strand;" while as the scale rises through the petty states
of Suburbia to the luxuries of Mayfair or Belgravia,--or to define one
locality more precisely, Park Lane,--we have all the ingredients with
which the novelist constructs his stories, be they of the nether world, or
the "_hupper suckles_." Few have there been who have essayed both. And now
the suburbs are breeding their own school of novelists. Possibly it is
the residents of those communities who demand a special brand of fiction,
as they do of coals, paraffine, and boot-polish.

At any rate the London that Dickens knew clung somewhat to Wordsworth's
happy description written but a half century before:

"Silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie,
Open unto the fields and to the sky,"

whereas to-day, as some "New Zealander" from the back blocks has said:
_"These Londoners they never seen no sun."_ And thus it is that the scale
runs from grave to gay, from poverty to purse full, and ever London,--the
London of the past as well as the present, of Grub Street as well as
Grosvenor Square. The centre of the world's literary activities, where, if
somewhat conventional as to the acceptation of the new idea in many of the
marts of trade, it is ever prolific in the launching of some new thing in
literary fashions.

At least it is true that London still merits the eulogistic lines penned
not many years gone by by a certain minor poet:

_"Ah, London! London! Our delight,_
_Great flower that opens but at night,_
_Great city of the Midnight Sun,_
_Whose day begins when day is done."_

It