Two quarrels we have with Mr. Kenneth Hare's Our Cockney
Ancestors (Henn, 15s., illustrated) are that its title is unworthy of its fascinating contents, and that the pub- lishers announce that the days of eld are "- robbed of- every stitch of beauty by the coarse and pointing finger of twentieth century ignorance." Yet there are Major Gordon Home, Mr. Lethaby, Sir Laurence Gornine, .all busy revivifying the history and beauty of the past. And is not the London County Council engaged in a sweeping survey. of all that is worth survey in London ? The success that this charming book is sure to meet with, is the best possible proof that there never was a time when we have been doing more to recover the flavour or preserve the monuments of Old London than the present. What Mr. Hare tries- to secure is not so much history as that elusive quality of atmosphere, and in the search for it he is able to assure himself and us that the essential quality of London life has not changed much. True, we cannot, like Shakespeare, contemplate a London when windmills crowned the heights of Hampstead, when Long Acre was called (and was) a Hedge Lane, and when invalids and ailing children went to the tiny village of Bloomsbury for the open-air cure. But all we Londoners still live and enjoy ourselves much in the same way as of old, although our Judges certainly do not rise now froM a heavy luncheon with the observation, " Well, gentlemen, I suppose we must hang some more of these damned scoundrels," and philosophers do not boast (as did Hobbes) that I have not been incapably drunk above a hundred times in my life." Mr. Hare has well succeeded in re-creating the life of the London of Chaucer, Anne Boleyn, Shakespeare
and Pcpys. * * *
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