Lovers of London are of diverse temperaments: some take pleasure in her humanity, some in her history, some in her treasures of science and art. But, for the full enjoyment of London, a man must have also that imaginative habit of mind which children call make-believe; he must be able to play at being in a foreign town. There are Londoners who keep all the year round the sense of sight-seeing, the holiday feeling, the happy knack of exploring Soho or the Borough as though they were in Paris or Florence. Old City churches, and the Surrey side, and the docks, are dear to them; they prefer not to know where they are; and they will even take a Baedeker's guide with them to heighten the pleasant self-illusion that they are on the Continent. “If one could do London now as a strange place”—that is what they long for; to discover, to wander as tourists, to be where they have not yet been. Everywhere they find something to see: they know the way down to the Early English crypt of St. John's, Clerkenwell, and the way up to the roof of the new Roman Catholic Cathedral. We commend to these wise Londoners the study of hospital chapels; they will be glad to hear of new sights unstarred by Baedeker.

Not all hospital chapels are worthy of a star; but even those that are ugly have distinction, and none are wholly dull. In some of them there is this or that one thing to be seen; for example, the wood-carving at St. Saviour's, the founder's statue at Guy's, and the windows at St. Bartholomew's, that were the first commission given to the present President of the Royal Academy. But, in the chapels of the Middlesex Hospital and of the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, there is not an inch that is not beautiful. Especially in the little chapel of the Middlesex, where ten years have been spent over the decoration of Pearson's exquisite design, the good Londoner will stand amazed at the wealth of marbles in all tints and veinings, and of gold mosaic of the utmost fineness; it is a veritable bit of Italy, a perfect example of the purest and richest decorative art of modern times.

(BMJ 1902;i:728)