thing is feasible. It has been done. Charles Lamb could go about the London of his day with just that pensive, penetrative sense of the curious human expressiveness of the place which we feel in the Old Town at Edinburgh, or in Ravenna. With an affection only less poignant than that of mothers, who can sometimes see already in their new-born infants the greyness and the wrinkles that will come, Lamb could anticipate in imagination the gradual deposits of time and see his contemporary London with all the emotional creepers already clinging about it which seem to ourselves to have grown since he died. If we can only do that, no modern street will be dull and the rawest new house may have already something of the fascination that it will assuredly have if it stands till the year 3000.

At any rate a little sympathy will disengage from a new building its indestructible interest as a contrivance, and a term in a long series of contrivances, every term in the series becoming rather winningly childlike as soon as a few more terms have followed it. Little effort is needed to see that childlike quality persisting on into the very term that is reached to-day and to find, perhaps, in walls of steel and concrete not so much a final perfection of cunning as a brave little effort to make shift with such means as we have, till the real thing comes. Faulty design, even vulgarity, may have its freakish interest. Some eighteenth-century châteaux in the north of France are only one room thick from back to front, to their apparent magnification, though much to the refrigeration of the occupants. Their avenues, too, may have the

trees wider apart at one end than at the other, to gain a false effect of length. The droll little snobs! You really cannot be angry with humbugs so infantine. Caddishness itself, when grown into an antique, becomes a curio rather than an offence. And so some charity may well be practised, to one's own profit, in viewing even those fruits of the fancy of speculative builders, the painty red suburban villas that seem to affect a likeness to ordinary houses lightly shelled with field-guns and then glazed at the holes, so that a little window of a funny shape may be found over the chimney-piece or in a corner of a room. If one of them were to live for a thousand years, how much the people of that age would be amused by seeing it! And why not enjoy that amusement ourselves?

WHAT IT ALL COMES TO

All places that the eye of Heaven visits
Are to the wise man ports and happy havens.

Richard II., I. iii. 275.

T

I

HE quest of the right place is over, without a mark left on the map to show that the right place

is there. It seemed for a time to be high on the Alps, and then down by a lake at their feet, or else beside the Adriatic sands, or under Picardy poplars, or among Tuscan or Umbrian walnuts and vines. Thence it shifted its site to our own less illustrious rivers and hills, and then to one of the least richly storied of the roads that cross them, and so to the average house you see behind the roadside trees, and at last to the workaday streets of towns that incur, with their plain faces, the censure of distinguished critics. Where, then, does rightness abide? How recognise it at sight, and make for it straight, shaking off from our boots the dust of places wrong or indifferent?

But another question comes first. What is a place— any place? Is it really that constant, precisely definable thing that our common uses of the word would seem to imply? Amid much that was vague in our sensations and unstable in our thoughts, space and time used to appear to stand fast, as the fixed stars did in those times. They seemed, like these, to hold out for our reassurance

or reproof a standard of unquestionable fact or of unalterable law. But of late Time himself has been losing some part of his reputation for an inexorable precision and firmness. Science has shown us the same eventthe passing of a comet, perhaps, or the bursting of a distant star-visible at one moment in its own neighbourhood and visible at a later minute, hour, or day at some point more remote. Our minds are set toying with new fancies. Suppose that a creature having human sight and hearing, but of a power and fineness immensely increased, could travel indefinitely far away from the earth, and travel faster than rays or vibrations of light travel through space. After going some millions of miles he would overtake waves that had been sent journeying into the void by yesterday's physical occurrences upon the earth. He might look back and see a man still living who died, as we on earth would say, last night. As the traveller went further away, time would continue to run its course backwards: the rolled-up scroll of history would unroll itself again; the cheers that rose from London streets at the Restoration might presently come into hearing, and bonfires twinkle into sight again that were lit by Norman soldiers at Hastings the night after Harold was killed. In a sense Cæsar is still being slain in the Capitol, and Hannibal struggling over the Alps, and Horatius defending the bridge, if indeed he ever did any such thing. Perhaps it may only be said that these things are past in so far as the person who says it happens to stand at one point in the physical universe rather than another.

Space, with its seemingly concrete filling of solids and liquids and gases, soon loses a part of its fixity too. It stands or falls with time, for each can only be stated in terms of the other. If you or I were God, and had the power of ubiquity that is commonly ascribed to God, we should be at the same time close to this earth and also at immense interstellar distances from it. The reach of our sight and hearing would not have limitations, as now. Thus we should see with the same eye at the same moment the world's events of to-day and also those of all past ages, as we call them, near and remote, all going on. The illusion of time would vanish. But something of space would go too. For in our sight a turfy down of chalk would still run from Dover across to Boulogne; and a greater Rhine, with the Trent and the Ouse for tributary streams, would still be flowing northward through meadows which-as seen from less far off-we call the North Sea. And yet the North Sea would be visibly lying there too. More subversive still, we should see, from our various, but simultaneous, posts of observation, the verdant earth of to-day and, filling the same position, a whirl of flaming gases twisted by their own movement into a fiery ball. Two unmistakably different things would at the same moment be visibly occupying the same space. Poor old Time! Poor old Space!

All that most of us can know about any place, or portion of space, that we pass through is that it stirs in us some emotion or other, which we have no means of comparing closely with any emotion that it may stir