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Tono Bungay by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
page 116 of 497 (23%)
as it were, the last dwindled representative of such a man of letters
as Swift. But now these things have escaped out of the Great House
altogether, and taken on a strange independent life of their own.

It is this idea of escaping parts from the seventeenth century system of
Bladesover, of proliferating and overgrowing elements from the Estates,
that to this day seems to me the best explanation, not simply of London,
but of all England. England is a country of great Renascence landed
gentlefolk who have been unconsciously outgrown and overgrown. The
proper shops for Bladesover custom were still to be found in Regent
Street and Bond Street in my early London days in those days they
had been but lightly touched by the American's profaning hand--and in
Piccadilly. I found the doctor's house of the country village or country
town up and down Harley Street, multiplied but not otherwise different,
and the family solicitor (by the hundred) further eastward in the
abandoned houses of a previous generation of gentlepeople, and down in
Westminster, behind Palladian fronts, the public offices sheltered
in large Bladesoverish rooms and looked out on St. James's Park. The
Parliament Houses of lords and gentlemen, the parliament house that was
horrified when merchants and brewers came thrusting into it a hundred
years ago, stood out upon its terrace gathering the whole system
together into a head.

And the more I have paralleled these things with my Bladesover-Eastry
model, the more evident it has become to me that the balance is not the
same, and the more evident is the presence of great new forces, blind
forces of invasion, of growth. The railway termini on the north side of
London have been kept as remote as Eastry had kept the railway-station
from Wimblehurst, they stop on the very outskirts of the estates, but
from the south, the South Eastern railway had butted its great stupid
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