(of fog and smoke)
"on St. Paul's in the very heart and densest tumult of London. It is much
better than staring white; the edifice would not be nearly so grand
without this drapery of black." Since we are told that the cost of the
building was defrayed by a tax on all coals brought into the port of
London, it gets its blackness by right. This grime is at all events a
well-established fact, which has to be accepted.

Mr. G. A. Sala, a friend and contemporary of Dickens, also wrote in
favour of the smoky chimneys. He says about St. Paul's: "It is really the
better for all the incense which all the chimneys since the time of Wren
have offered at its shrine, and are still flinging up every day from their
foul and grimy censers." As a flower of speech, this is good, but as
criticism it is equivalent to saying the less seen of it the better. M.
Taine, the French critic, evidently thought otherwise; he wrote of
Somerset House:

"A frightful thing is the huge palace in the Strand which is called
Somerset House. Massive and heavy piece of architecture, of which the
hollows are inked, the porticoes blackened with soot, where in the cavity
of the empty court is a sham fountain without water, pools of water on the
pavement, long rows of closed windows. What can they possibly do in these
catacombs? It seems as if the livid and sooty fog had even befouled the
verdure of the parks. But what most offends the eyes are the colonnades,
peristyles, Grecian ornaments, mouldings, and wreaths of the houses, all
bathed in soot. Poor antique architecture--what is it doing in such a
climate?"

To decide what style of architecture prevails in the medley of different
periods constituting London is indeed difficult. One authority concludes
that the "dark house in the long, unlovely street," of which Tennyson
tells, and Mme. de Stael vituperates, covers the greater number of acres.
The fact is, each of the districts constituting London as it now is,
_i. e._, Belgravia, Tyburnia, Bayswater, Kensington, Chelsea, etc., has
the impress and character of the time of its greatest popularity and
fashion and of the class by which it was principally inhabited. It has
always been the city's fate to have its past overgrown and stifled by the
enthralling energy and life of the present. It is as a hive that has never
been emptied of its successive swarms. This is more or less the fate of
all towns that live.

The first map of London was published in 1563 by