what is practical.
The aesthete is sometimes more of a vandal than the vandal.
The proposed reconstructions of Jerusalem have been on
the whole reasonable and sympathetic; but there is always
a danger from the activities, I might almost say the antics,
of a sort of antiquary who is more hasty than an anarchist.
If the people of such places revolt against their own limitations,
we must have a reasonable respect for their revolt, and we must
not be impatient even with their impatience.

It is their town; they have to live in it, and not we.
As they are the only judges of whether their antiquities are
really authorities, so they are the only judges of whether their
novelties are really necessities. As I pointed out more than once
to many of my friends in Jerusalem, we should be very much annoyed
if artistic visitors from Asia took similar liberties in London.
It would be bad enough if they proposed to conduct excavations
in Pimlico or Paddington, without much reference to the people
who lived there; but it would be worse if they began to relieve them
of the mere utilitarianism of Chelsea Bridge or Paddington Station.
Suppose an eloquent Abyssinian Christian were to hold up his hand and stop
the motor-omnibuses from going down Fleet Street on the ground that
the thoroughfare was sacred to the simpler locomotion of Dr. Johnson.
We should be pleased at the African's appreciation of Johnson;
but our pleasure would not be unmixed. Suppose when you or I are
in the act of stepping into a taxi-cab, an excitable Coptic Christian
were to leap from behind a lamp-post, and implore us to save
the grand old growler or the cab called the gondola of London.
I admit and enjoy the poetry of the hansom; I admit and enjoy
the personality of the true cabman of the old four-wheeler, upon whose
massive manhood descended something of the tremendous tradition
of Tony Weller. But I am not so certain as I should like to be,
that I should at that moment enjoy the personality of the Copt.
For these reasons it seems really desirable, or at least defensible,
to defer any premature reconstruction of disputed things,
and to begin this book as a mere note-book or sketch-book
of things as they are, or at any rate as they appear.
It was in this irregular order, and in this illogical disproportion,
that things did in fact appear to me, and it was some time before I saw
any real generalisation that would reduce my impressions to order.
I saw that the gr