art in a tangle of apple-blossom, and when the statue of
James II is wreathed about with stars and boughs of hawthorn as fair as
a young girl's arms, when Kensington Gardens, Brockwell Park, and the
Tunnel Gardens of Blackwell are ablaze with colour and song, and when
life riots in the sap of the trees as in the blood of the children who
throng their walks, then, I say, London is herself. But I know that when
November brings the profound fogs and glamorous lights, and I walk
perilously in the safest streets, knowing by sound that I am
accompanied, but seeing no one, scarce knowing whether I am in Oxford
Street or the Barking Road, or in Stamboul, then I shall feel: "This is
the real old London." The pallid pomp of the white lilac seems to be
London in essence. The rich-scented winter fog seems to be London in
essence. The hot, reeking dusk of July seems to be London in essence.

London, I repeat, is all things to all men. Whatsoever you may find in
the uttermost corners of the earth, that you shall find in London. It is
the city of the world. You may stand in Piccadilly Circus at midnight
and fingerpost yourself to the country of your dreams. A penny or
twopenny omnibus will land you in the heart of France, Switzerland,
Italy, Germany, Russia, Palestine, China, the Malay Peninsula, Norway,
Sweden, Holland, and Hooligania; to all of which places I propose to
take you, for food and drink, laughter and chatter, in the pages that
follow. I shall show you London by night: not the popular melodramatic
divisions of London rich and London poor, but many Londons that you
never dreamed of and may curious nights.

London by night. Somehow, the pen stops there. Having written that, I
feel that the book is done. I realize my impotence. My pen boggles at
the task of adding another word or another hundred thousand words which
shall light up those thunderous syllables. For to write about London
Nights is to write a book about _Everything_. Philosophy, humanism,
religion, love, and death, and delight--all these things must crowd upon
one's pages. And once I am started, they will crowd--tiresomely,
chaotically, tumbling out in that white heat of enthusiasm which, as a
famous divine has said, makes such damned hard reading.

For the whole of my life, with brief breaks, has been spent in London,
sometimes working by day and playing by night, sometimes idling by day
and toiling through long midnights, either in streets, clubs, bars, and
s