GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 3

descent, who had broken with the too rigid rule of Westminster
sixty years before, were furiously engaged in developing and
throwing open to European emigration an uninhabited con-
tinent. In central and southern America, seventeen scantily
populated and ramshackle Latin states, recently revolted from
Spanish and Portuguese rule, offered an almost illimitable field •
to the exploiter. Here also Britain with her sea power and her
growing manufacturing and banking supremacy was first among
her trading rivals.

• •••••••

Such was the planet in which for that moment in time
rustic England held vigorous but kindly mastery. Her capital,
London was the symbol of that supremacy. With its two million
inhabitants it was by far the largest and richest city in the world
and like the nation itself had more than doubled its size since
the beginning of the century. Stretching from Shadwell and
Wapping in the east it extended along both banks of the Thames
as far as outer Chelsea and Battersea: thence a double line of
villas ensconced among trees and large gardens continued almost
to Hampton Court. For the first time in its history the city was
venturing away from the river; houses, skirting the new
Regent's Park, strayed into the fields and farms of Primrose Hill
where children still gathered the flowers which gave it its name.
Everywhere bricks and mortar were rising: the removal of the
Court from St. James's to Buckingham Palace had stimulated an
outburst of building on the marshy fields and market gardens of
Pimlico, soon to be renamed after its Cheshire owners, Belgravia.
The red brick of which Wren and his successors had re-created
London after the great fire was giving place to white and poten-
tially grimy stucco:

"Augustus at Rome was for building renowned
And of marble he left what of brick he had found;
But is not our Nash, too, a very great master,
He finds us all brick and leaves us all plaster."

Standing on top of thef Duke of York's column on an early
summer day of 1842, the downward-glancing eye lighted on a
jumble of old houses and red-tiled roofs mingling with the
foliage and blossom of Spring Gardens. Along the Mall the trees
still straggled anyhow, unregimented into their modern columns,