Page:Soullondonasurv00fordgoog.djvu/179

RV 162 (REST IN LONDON) brilliant talkers, great gamblers, women very dissolute and men very coarse; they stood, in fact, rather for still-life gossip than for national actions, rather for Memoirs than for "History." But the older streets that they displaced stood for kings, great nobles, great churchmen. Westminster Hall—which has given place to that great ugly box with its futile tracery of misplaced ornaments—Westminster Hall saw History. The times then were less spacious, and, London being so much smaller, the really insignificant acts of kings, nobles, and churchmen "counted" to an extent that no single act of any one man could to-day count.

And that tendency is inevitable as the world grows broader, as the cities stretch out. "History" becomes impossible. It was already, as far as London was concerned, over and done with when the young Pretender failed in the '45. Had he taken London, sacked the City, crowned himself in Westminster, misruled, caused new revolutions to foment, new deeds of blood and rapine to set the stones of the Court whispering, history might have continued to be made until near our own day. Nay, even London itself might have been checked for a century or two of its growth, since turbulence and the civil wars inevitable to the Stuarts would have delayed the coming of Arkwrights and Kays, have put back the clock of our industrial developments, have influenced the fate of the whole world. But history of that type ended with Culloden.

The Chronicler had to turn his pen to the accounts of the great impersonal movements, as: "It was then 162