may pass in its streets. It blunts, by its vastness, their peculiarities, and our interest it dulls. So that it seems to be a City formed, not for you and me, not for single men, but for bands of Encyclopaedists, Corporations, Societies. Speaking roughly, we may say that the pleasantest size for a graveyard—and what is London but a vast graveyard of stilled hopes in which the thin gnat-swarm of the present population dances its short day above the daily growing, indisturbable detritus of all the past at rest?—the pleasantest size for a graveyard is one in which each man and woman at rest could rise up and proclaim: "In my day I played a part. I had an influence upon the whole community here. Who is here that does not know my virtues and my vices? I planted the chestnut that gives all that shade on the green." But imagine the great London "Cemeteries"—for they are graveyards no longer—those vast stretches of heavy clay land, desecrated with all manner of hideous and futile excrescences that no passer-by will be caught to look at, appealing like piteous beggars in endless rows for the charity of your glance; the trees that appear half unreal in the mistiness because they are such that no one would place anywhere but in a "Cemetery"; the iron railings that are grotesque because they serve to keep nothing within a space that no living mortal is anxious to enter. But no doubt it is the penalty of being dead that one's memorial should be grotesque: the penalty of fighting against oblivion which is irresistible and pitiless. And, no doubt, it is with the sense of the fitness of things that London, the
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