Portraits of London, the Magnificent, Through the Centuries : THE OXFORD BOOK OF LONDON edited by Paul Bailey; Oxford University Press $25, 377 pages

“It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London,” Henry James wrote in his notebooks, as excerpted in this splendid but too slim volume.

“It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. . . .

“It is the biggest aggregation of human life--the most complete compendium of the world.”

Novelist Paul Bailey has lovingly put together this collection of writings about London from the 12th to the 20th centuries.

Each piece is a delight to read, but at 377 pages, the book is much too short. London as a subject would have supported a solid anthology of 1,000 pages or so; this book is merely a sampler. For example, we are given the first act of Shaw’s “Pygmalion” when including the whole play would have been more satisfying.

Bailey writes that London “is now in the process of drawing its cultural strength from the people who have come to inhabit it from the Empire of which it was for so long the center.”

And, indeed, the image of London as a magnet runs throughout this collection.

Thomas De Quincey is quoted in his 1834 “The Nation of London”: “Often . . . at distances of two and three hundred miles or more from this colossal emporium of men, wealth, arts and intellectual power, have I felt the sublime expression of her enormous magnitude in one simple form of ordinary occurrence--viz., in the vast droves of cattle, suppose upon the great north roads, all with their heads directed to London, and expounding the size of the attracting body, together with the force of its attractive power, by the never-ending succession of these droves, and the remoteness from the capital of the lines upon which they were moving.

“A suction so powerful, felt along radii so vast, and a consciousness, at the same time, that upon other radii still more vast, both by land and by sea, the same suction is operating, night and day, summer and winter, and hurrying for ever into one centre the infinite means needed for her infinite purposes. . . .”

Was there ever written a more compelling description of the attractive power of a great metropolis?

“London” also contains many touchstones of our language.

Some are nonetheless welcome for being expected. There is Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion” with its limpid refrain, “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.” There is Daniel Defoe with a small section from “A Journal of the Plague Year,” and John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys on the Great Fire of 1666.

There is a fair selection from Dickens, who gave his name to “Dickensian London”: passages from “Dombey and Son,” “Oliver Twist,” “Our Mutual Friend,” and, of course, the majestic opening to “Bleak House”:

“London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, 40 feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. . . .”

There is Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”--”Earth has not anything to show more fair . . .” and its modern echo from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”-- “Unreal City,/Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many. . . .”

Bailey’s selections are not all high literature. He has chosen revealing snapshots of London’s poor, into whom he was born, especially the Cockneys who “constitute a particular aspect of London’s durability.”

Other selections are pleasingly eccentric. He quotes from Verlaine and Chateaubriand, Mozart and Haydn, Van Gogh and Monet. My only complaint is this book’s brevity. It has no George Orwell, no Dylan Thomas. The book goes by too fast.