open leaves.

CHELSEA REACH

The worst of all reasons for continuing anything is that it is easily
continuable. The Houses of Parliament have an air as though you could take
them on along the river towards Chelsea without any necessity for
stopping. But that very suggestion prompts its own refusal. No man would
hold this characteristic to be one that makes for the beauty of a design;
what there is of a really fine building never prompted the wish that it
were to be prolonged. And although an embanking wall is not the same thing
as a building, yet of even an embankment it may be said that the fact that
it is already very long is at any rate a poor reason for making it longer.
When the thing is not altogether admirable, it would be hard to urge a
better reason for making no more of it. This is worth saying in
consideration of a recent measure of improvement directed against the last
bit left of the Chelsea foreshore. The measure was urged on the plea of
uniformity, which obviously has reference to the beauty of the bank.
Therefore when the protesters against the change were accused--as
doubtless they were--of opposing it for reasons of sentiment, they might
well answer that the County Council also has reasons of sentiment. '_Le
coeur a ses raisons!_' The feeling for uniformity is a sentiment, like
another. While, then, uniformity is one of the 'reasons of the heart' of a
County Council, the inhabitants of Cheyne Walk are free to press reasons
of their own hearts.

The Embankment stops short at its westward end, in the course of Cheyne
Walk, just below the place where the river leaves a little bend which is
an inlet, an incident, of the long Reach. Call the curve a gulf, and this
is a little bay within it. The bay is a small, forgotten, abiding,
unremarked shore, with a great deal of modern London not only below it,
but above it, on its further side--that is, between it and the vaguest
beginnings of the country. Nevertheless, it is not modern at all. It looks
like the overlooked little bits of cottage, tiled cottage-roof, and
cottage front-garden, that are to be seen forgotten in the roaring streets
of Fulham--true bits of village in the depths of town. But in any case it
is to go, even though the gulf is saved. Let us say at once that there may
be two intelligible opinions as to the Embankment at Westminster and
Charing Cross. There is something due to the worldly dignity of a great
city. The distinction of Lon