A thorough history of our great city, considered in every aspect, would almost be a condensed history of the world. I offer these pages to my readers only as a humble contribution to the history of London.
THE BLACK JACK, PORTSMOUTH STREET, LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.
Our commercial wealth and the vastness of our maritime enterprise is shown in nothing more than by the distance from which we fetch our commonest articles of consumption—tea from China, sugar from the West Indies, coffee from Ceylon, oil from the farthest nooks of Italy, chocolate from Mexico. An Englishman need not be very rich in order to consume samples of all these productions of different hemispheres at a single meal.
In the same manner many books of far-divided ages have gone to form the patchwork of the present volume; I am like the merchant who sends his ships to collect in different harbours, and across wide and adverse seas, the materials that he needs. In this busy and overworked age there are many persons who have no time themselves to make such voyages, no patience to traverse such seas, even if they possessed the charts: it is for them I have written, and it is from them I hope for some kind approval.
APPENDIX.
“The West End seems to me one vast cemetery. Hardly a street but has in it a house once occupied by dear friends with whom I had daily intercourse: if I stopped and knocked now, who would know or take interest in me? The streets to me are peopled with shadows: the city is as a city of the dead.”—Samuel Rogers.
The Strand (South Side).—[p. 25.]