we have Buckingham Street and also Villiers Street.  To say that this is not aristocracy is simply intellectual impudence.  I am an ordinary citizen, and my name is Gilbert Keith Chesterton; and I confess that if I found three streets in a row in the Strand, the first called Gilbert Street, the second Keith Street, and the third Chesterton Street, I should consider that I had become a somewhat more important person in the commonwealth than was altogether good for its health.  If Frenchmen ran London (which God forbid!), they would think it quite as ludicrous that those streets should be named after the Duke of Buckingham as that they should be named after me.  They are streets out of one of the main thoroughfares of London.  If French methods were adopted, one of them would be called Shakspere Street, another Cromwell Street, another Wordsworth Street; there would be statues of each of these persons at the end of each of these streets, and any streets left over would be named after the date on which the Reform Bill was passed or the Penny Postage established.

Suppose a man tried to find people in London by the names of the places.  It would make a fine farce, illustrating our illogicality.  Our hero having once realised that Buckingham Street was named after the Buckingham family, would naturally walk into Buckingham Palace in search of the Duke of Buckingham.  To his astonishment he would meet somebody quite different.  His simple lunar logic would lead him to suppose that if he wanted the Duke of Marlborough (which seems unlikely) he would find him at Marlborough House.  He would find the Prince of Wales.  When at last he understood that the Marlboroughs live at Blenheim, named after the great Marlborough’s victory, he would, no doubt, go there.  But he would again find himself in error if, acting upon this principle, he tried to find the Duke of Wellington, and told the cabman to drive to Waterloo.  I wonder that no one has written a wild romance about the adventures of such an alien, seeking the great English aristocrats, and only guided by the names; looking for the Duke of Bedford in the town of that name, seeking for some trace of the Duke of Norfolk in Norfolk.  He might sail for Wellington in New Zealand to find the ancient seat of the Wellingtons.  The last scene might show him trying to learn Welsh in order to converse with the Prince of Wales.

But even if the imaginary traveller knew no alphabet of this earth at all, I think it would still be possible to suppose him seeing a difference between London and Paris, and, upon the whole, the real difference.  He would not be able to read the words “Quai Voltaire;” but he would see the sneering statue and the hard, straight roads; without having heard of Voltaire he would understand that the city was Voltairean.  He would not know that Fleet Street was named after the Fleet Prison.  But the same national spirit which kept the Fleet Prison closed and narrow still keeps Fleet Street closed and narrow.