THE NEW GREAT FIRE
Sm,—To praise The Spectator would too often be to gild the lily : and neither task does any moderately sensible man take in hand. With that premise, may I express a feeling of considerable disappointment at the inadequacy of the references in last week's Spectator to what happened in the City of London on Sunday night? With more than ordinary eagerness I turned to its pages: nothing much in " News of the Week "; well, there would be a leader of the most weighty over page, and " Janus " would not miss such an opportunity. But at least the silence still prevailing would be broken by a notable " middle article." Not a bit of it—and the browser on old Spectators a century hence will not know that anything out of the common took place on Sunday, December 29th, turning dark night into a horrible and sinister caricature of day.
No one who was there to see (and the St. Paul's community was in the midst of it) can have thought of the rain of man-made fire from heaven, with its horrible results, as other than a revelation of something utterly foul and vile. With it any compromise is impossible. But to say all that needs to be said calls for the tongue of a Gladstone
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