wild prospects; and Lapland is
remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, sir, let me tell
you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road
that leads him to London!"

So dangerous it always was to put a phrase into Johnson's mouth! So
dangerous above {152} all to try to make him prefer anything to his
beloved London. Perhaps no nation in the world has cared so little
about its capital city as the English. When one thinks of the
passionate affection lavished on Athens, Rome, Paris, even, strange as
it seems to us, on Madrid, one is tempted to accuse the English of dull
disloyalty to their own noble capital city. London played, at any rate
till the French Revolution, a far more important part in English life
than any other capital in the life of any other country. In the reign
of Charles II, according to Macaulay, it was seventeen times as large
as Bristol, then the second city in the Kingdom; a relative position
unique in Europe. And all through our history it had led the nation in
politics as well as in commerce. Yet of the best of all tributes to
greatness, the praise of great men, it had received singularly little.
There is Milton's noble burst of eloquence in the _Areopagitica_, but
that is the praise not so much of London as of the religion and
politics of London at a particular moment. Spenser's beautiful
allusion in the _Prothalamion_ to "mery London my most kyndly nurse"
and to the "sweet Thames" whom he invites to "run softely till I end my
song" is among the few tributes of personal affection paid by our poets
to the great city. And it is still true {153} to-day that the tutelary
genius of London is none of the great poets: it is Samuel Johnson. At
this moment, as these pages are being written, the railway stations of
London are filled with picture advertisements of the attractions of the
great city. And who is the central figure in the picture that deals
with central London! Not Shakespeare or Milton, but Johnson. The
worn, rather sad face, more familiar to Englishmen than that of any
other man of letters, with the wig and brown coat to make recognition
certain, is chosen as the most useful for their purpose by advertisers
probably innocent of any literature, but astute enough in knowing what
will attract the people.

Johnson's love of London, however, was of his own sort, quite unlike
that of Charles Lamb for instance, or that of such a man as Sir Walter
Besan