London shows both sides of its shield: incalculable wealth, poverty that defies description. Years of familiarity with its slums, before slumming was invented as a fashionable fad, only deepened the conviction that all the noble efforts to eradicate the worst evils in the situation are utterly hopeless. The breed flourishes faster than the mild measures to improve it can operate.
The homes of aristocracy in Mayfair, the heart of the West End, disappoint those who expect magnificence--long rows of houses in narrow streets, once red brick, now dingy black and musty-looking, the monotony broken here and there by a newer and more pretentious stone mansion. The great Squares are a brighter feature. The same sooty brick houses, large and small, make the quadrangle, each having a key to the gates that enclose the park, in which nursemaids exercise the children and pet dogs, and an occasional game of croquet is ventured by country cousins. The coating of soot on every branch and leaf is fatal to clean hands and summer costumes. The newer streets, and the region around the South Kensington Museums, make a better display of architecture. A little experience will reconcile the stranger to the general dowdiness of house exteriors, when he learns that the English climate has caused the English people to think most of the home within. The contrast on entering these plain structures is startling and gratifying. While this home love and home pride with homely ways are the strongest characteristics of the people, the saying of Charles the Second is still true, that there is no other country in which one can spend so many hours the year round in the open air. They spend as much of their daylight as possible out of doors and their evenings at home have a hearty, informal, delightful charm, wholly in contrast to the stiff and stagy receptions known in other cities.
The innate love of country life is shown by rich and poor alike. On the four legal bank holidays, the Monday after Christmas, Easter Monday, Whitsun Monday, and the first Monday in August, all business is suspended throughout the land, in most cases from the Friday evening until Tuesday morning. Then the masses come forth in all their might and finery, they take possession of the street vehicles, the railways and boats. The "upper" and "upper middle" classes religiously stay at home on those days, dreading the uproarious throngs of 'Arries and 'Arriets, who jam themselves ten deep into seats for five and monopolize every place of amusement. Yet it is a cheery sight to see all these hundreds of thousands of London toilers hurrying on wheels of all sorts away to Epping Forest, kept in its virgin state these four hundred years, and to Hampstead Heath, the Crystal Palace, the great parks, and similar handy breathing places, not to mention the favorite resorts within a twenty-mile radius. You will smile at grown folks playing skip the rope the whole day long, and kiss in the ring, and such like primitive games, but it is a wholesome sign when a whole population can find hearty pleasure in romping on the grass, for simple delights gained by healthy open-air exercise yield a more lasting happiness than is to be got by paying money to sit still and see hirelings make antics for you.