cut alike, or in bowlers, broadcloth, or corduroys. But there is difference enough between wearer and wearer of these uniforms.
Tall blocks of office buildings are crushing out the associations of the Westminster courts, alleys, and squares. We see terracotta ornamental excrescences, meaning nothing to us; heavy masses that, to those of us who care about architectural proportions, are repulsive, because, for us, they have no associations. The Memoirists have not yet written them up. But to our great grandchildren these excrescences will have meanings and associations, these heavinesses will be suggestive, because we, their ancestors, lived amongst these things our pathetic, petty, and futile lives.
When Westminster was still an ecclesiastical islet with a drawbridge, odd roads and quaint figures, there were men who grumbled because apple orchards had taken the place of swamps where the wild geese cried all night. And there were monks who rejoiced that new stone salting houses had taken the place of the old, rotting wooden curing huts. They thought their houses looked better, just as nearly all London thinks the office buildings look better than the eighteenth-century rabbit-warrens of small houses. And there were others who foresaw gigantic and impersonal futures for the Church, the Minster, or for Mankind. And your Abbot Samson found his Jocelynd of Brakelond to be a Boswell for him.
Even the Great Figure still lives: for humanity craves for admiration to give and to take. In the streets you
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