It is not until one is tied to a locality that its defects become apparent.  A street that interests the mind by some charm of populous vivacity when it is traversed at random and without object, becomes inexpressibly wearisome when it is the thoroughfare of daily duty.  My daily duty took me through a long stretch of Oxford Street, which is a street not altogether destitute of some real claim to gaiety and dignity.  At first I was ready to concede this claim, and even to endorse it with enthusiasm; but from the day when I realised that Oxford Street conducted me, by a force of inevitable gravitation, to a desk in an office, I began to loathe it.  The eye became conscious of a hundred defects and incongruities; the tall houses rose like prison walls; the resounding tumult of the streets seemed like the clamour of tormented spirits.  For the first time I began to understand why imaginative writers had often likened London to Inferno.

I well remember by what a series of curious expedients I endeavoured to evade these sensations.  The most obvious was altogether to avoid this glittering and detested thoroughfare by making long detours through the meaner streets which lay behind it; but this was merely to exchange one kind of aesthetic misery which had some alleviations for another kind which had none.  Sometimes I endeavoured to contrive a doubtful exhilaration from the contrast which these meaner streets afforded; saying to myself, as I pushed my way through the costers’ stalls of Great James Street, ’Now you are exchanging squalor for magnificence.  Be prepared for a surprise.’  But the ruse failed utterly, and my mind laughed aloud at the pitiful imposture.  Another device was to create points of interest, like a series of shrines along a tedious road, which should present some aspect of allurement.  There was a book-shop here or an art-shop there; yesterday a biography of Napoleon was exhibited in the one, or a print of Murillo’s ‘Flight into Egypt,’ in the other; and it is become a matter of speculation whether they were there to-day.  Just as a solitary sailor will beguile the tedium of empty days at sea by a kind of cribbage, in which the left hand plays against the right, so I laid odds for and against myself on such trifles as these, and even went so far as to keep an account of my successes and my failures.  Thus, for a whole month I was interested in a person quite unknown to me, who wore an obsolete white beaver hat, appeared punctually at the corner of Bond Street at half-past five in the afternoon, and spent half an hour in turning over the odd volumes displayed on the street board of a secondhand-book shop not far from Oxford Circus.  His appearances were so planetary in their regularity that one might have reckoned time by them.  Who he was, or what his objects in life may have been, I never learned.  I never saw him walk but in the one direction; I never saw him buy one of the many books which he examined:  perhaps he also was afflicted with the tedium of London, and took this singular way of getting through a portion of his sterile day with a simulated interest.  At all events he afforded me an interest, and when he vanished at the end of the month, Oxford Street once more became intolerable to me.