The Napoleon of Notting Hill

If you look at a thing nine hun­dred and ninety-nine times, you are per­fectly safe; if you look at it the thou­sandth time, you are in fright­ful danger of see­ing it for the first time.

What a farce is this mod­ern lib­er­al­ity! Free­dom of speech means prac­tic­ally, in our mod­ern civil­isa­tion, that we must only talk about un­im­port­ant things. We must not talk about re­li­gion, for that is il­liberal; we must not talk about bread and cheese, for that is talk­ing shop; we must not talk about death, for that is de­press­ing; we must not talk about birth, for that is in­del­ic­ate. It can­not last.

The gro­cer sat for some little while, with dim eyes and his mouth open, look­ing rather like a fish.

No Eastern king ever had such ar­gosies or such car­goes com­ing from the sun­rise and the sun­set, and So­lomon in all his glory was not en­riched like one of you. In­dia is at your el­bow,” he cried, lift­ing his voice and point­ing his stick at a drawer of rice, the gro­cer mak­ing a move­ment of some alarm, “Ch­ina is be­fore you, Dem­er­ara is be­hind you, Amer­ica is above your head, and at this very mo­ment, like some old Span­ish ad­miral, you hold Tunis in your hands.

Thence­for­ward the fanci­ful idea of the de­fence of Not­ting Hill in war be­came to him a thing as solid as eat­ing or drink­ing or light­ing a pipe.

Above all, he knew the su­preme psy­cho­lo­gical fact about pat­ri­ot­ism, as cer­tain in con­nec­tion with it as that a fine shame comes to all lov­ers, the fact that the pat­riot never un­der any cir­cum­stances boasts of the large­ness of his coun­try, but al­ways, and of ne­ces­sity, boasts of the small­ness of it.

Hymns on the Hill was not at all like the poems ori­gin­ally pub­lished in praise of the po­etry of Lon­don. And the reason was that it was really writ­ten by a man who had seen noth­ing else but Lon­don, and who re­garded it, there­fore, as the uni­verse.

However much, phys­ic­ally, ‘about town’ a wo­man may be, she still mod­els her­self on nature; she tries to carry nature with her; she bids grasses to grow on her head, and furry beasts to bite her about the throat. In the heart of a dim city, she mod­els her hat on a flar­ing cot­tage garden of flowers. We, with our no­bler civic sen­ti­ment, model ours on a chim­ney pot; the en­sign of civil­isa­tion.

a man about town

there is one re­spect in which a town must be more po­et­ical than the coun­try, since it is closer to the spirit of man; for Lon­don, if it be not one of the mas­ter­pieces of man, is at least one of his sins.