st; its business, its rush, its roar, are such serious things, sights, sounds. The City is getting its living, the West End

es out on cr

s of stre

in the Ci

enough

"A London P

a of energy and power. It is the pulse,-or rather the aorta,-of the tremendous machine of London; through its crowded veins rushes the life-blood of commerce, of industry, of wealth, that feeds and stimulates n

d ancient stone, absolutely startling in their quiet proximity to the surrounding din and whirl. Though the area of the "City," so-called, is but small, yet it abounds in such peaceful, undreamed-of spots; places where the painter may set up his easel, or even the photographer his c

f all things

bove the c

abides a pe

make and c

blackened dome of St. Paul's,-looking, in such close proximity,-and especially if there happen to be any fog about,-of positively incredible size. Or he may find peaceful red-brick rectories, that suggest country villages, adjoining, in all charity, noisy mills and warehouses; or railways and canals, which give forth smoke and steam with amiable impartiality, and intersect streets where fragments of old houses yet linger in pic

um, which it now adorns; and the church tower of the ancient "All Hallows Staining," surviving its demolished nave and choir, still stands, a curiously isolated relic, in the green square of the Clothworkers' Hall; that company being bound over to keep it in order and repair. Similarly, the pains and the great expense incurred in the careful restoration of that old Holborn landmark, Staple Inn, a score or so of years back, are well known. And "Crosby Hall," anciently Crosby Place, that famous Elizabethan mansion commemorated in Shakespeare's Richard III., is now, after much danger and many vicissitudes, utilised for the purposes of a res

st beyond the famous hospital of the same name, it is yet difficult to find. Its diminutive and somewhat inadequate red-brick tower is but just visible above the row of houses that divide it from Smithfield, and the modest entrance to its precincts, underneath a mere shop-archway, may easily be missed. The church is, in fact, almost hidden by neighbouring houses. While its main entrance faces Smithfield, the dark, mysterious, densely-inhabited district c

thf

and dirty, their lower timbers bulging, yet most picturesque in their decay. They all appear to be let out in rooms to poor workers; above, patched and ragged articles of clothing are hanging out to dry, while on the ground floor you may see a shoemaker hammering away at his last, or a carpenter at his lathe, his light much intercepted by a big adjacent gravestone, on which a black cat, emblem of witchery, is sitting. The gravestones seem not at all to

ottomless pit" and all its horrors. From this very disagreeable position he was delivered by the merciful St. Bartholomew, who thereupon ordered him to go home and build a church in his honour on a site that he should direct, assuring him that he (the saint), would supply the necessary funds. Returning home, Rahere gained the king's consent to the work, which was forthwith begun, and assisted greatly by miraculous agency; such as bright light shining on the roof of the rising edifice, wonderful cures worked there, and all such supernatural revelations. When Rahere died, in the odour of sanctity, and the first prior of his foundation, he left thirteen canons attached to it; which number his successor, Prior Thomas, had raised in 1174 to thirty-five. Thus the monastery grew through successive priors, till it was one of the largest religious houses in London. Its precincts and accessories extended at one time as far as Aldersgate Street; these however vanished with the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII., and all that remains to the present day is the abbreviated priory church and a small part of a cloister. In monastic times the nave of the edifice extended, indeed, the whole length of the little churchyard, as far as the dog-toothed Smithfield entrance gate; but of

d have been grief, almost despair to the antiquary. A fringe factory occupied the "Lady-Chapel" and even projected into the apse; a school was held in the triforium; and a blacksmith's forge filled one of the transepts. The fringe factory cost no less than ￡6,000 to buy out; the blacksmith whose forge had been inside the church for 250 years, was removed for a sum of ￡2,000. In the north transept you may still see the stone walls and arches blackened with the smoke of the forge, and a curious white patch, yet remaining on the pillared wall, testifies to the exact spot where the blacksmith's tool-cupboard used to stand. The feet of the horses can hardly be said to have improved the Norman pillars. Pious legend is already busy with the history of the reco

neys, even "superior" cockneys, are born and die in London without ever troubling themselves over the existence of these ancient relics of the past. Yet, if the natural beauties of St. Bartholomew are great, greater still is its historical interest. The vandalisms of the Reformation, and, later, of the Protectorate, have fortunately spared most of its ancient monuments, and the tomb of Rahere, the founder and earliest prior, shows its recumbent effigy still uninjured under a vaulted canopy. The tomb is on the north side of the choir, just inside the communion rails. Though the canopy is admittedly the work of a fifteenth-ce

us canonicus et primus

disclosed, together with a part of a sandal, which latter may b

f watching the revered monument. Prior Bolton, the most famous of Rahere's successors, ruled the convent from 1506 to 1532; his window is a projecting or

times had, curiously enough, not blackened this tomb, but endued its alabaster with an upper coating of sham marble-now removed. The remainder of the tombs and monuments will all repay inspection; a

ceased, he for

t her, lik'd i

doctor," which is made of a kind of porous marble that exudes water in

riny floods. Wh

teares, and see

shame; or if y

stay and see the

church was damp, so damp that the rector-if report is to be believed-had to preach sometimes under an umbrella, and th

in these dark purlieus of "Little Britain," house-room is frightfully dear, and in the crumbling tenements of "Cloth Fair," a poor room costs about 6s. per week. As to the population, only fifteen years ago they were rough, rowdy, even criminal in places; now, however, the district is mainly respectable, although overcrowded by workers-factory hands, private manufacturers, widows who work in City offices and who cling to the locality as being near and convenient. It is very difficult for the authorities to obviate overcrowding in certain central London districts. Little Britain, now devoted to warehouses and tenement dwellings, was in old days filled wi

" used to be held, that court which, during fair-time, corrected weights and measures and granted licenses. It

ield,-under which is the archway and dog-toothed gate to the old church, already mentioned,-is, so far as one can gather from an old print, little altered since those cruel days when mayors, grandees, and respectable citizens would sit and watch the tortures of poor, faithful men and women. Especially at the beautiful Anne

burn each other,

tles would have d

memorial is now an inscribed stone on the outer wall of St. Ba

rd, John Philpot, servants of God, suffered death by fire

ginally a tournament and tilt ground, Smithfield was in those days a broad meadow-land fringed with elms, beyond the old London walls. Miracle-plays, public executions, tortures, fairs, and burnings appear to have taken place here in indiscriminate alternation, unti

lomew's, S

t. Bartholomew the Less, originally built by Rahere just after his return from Rome, but re-erected in 1823. The spacious courtyards of the hospital, collegiate in size and cleanliness, and pleasantly shaded by trees, afford pretty and pathetic sights. Here, on fine days of spring and summer, a few convalescents, pale and bandaged, may be seen sitting out and enjoying the fresh air and sunshine, talking, reading, or simply engrossed in watching a game of ball playe

sidential look of time-darkened red brick is now but a blind, and it is rapidly becoming a square of hotels and lodging-houses. Such a fate was, of course, inevitable in its case; and yet it seems mournful. The spot where Rutland House, the ancient residence of the Venetian ambassador, once stood, is only commemorated now in the name of Rutland Place. The City palaces have crumbled; they have all been rebuilt in the far West; and even Bloomsbury has none left, except t

is supported by lions; this and much more; but you do not always feel in a mood to digest guide-books. They are so aggressive in their information, and so distracting to one's own thoughts! For, how many associations does not this cl

f the dissolution is a cruel and heartrending one. Prior Houghton, the last superior of the monastery, protested against the king's spoliation of Church lands; he was promptly convicted of high treason, an

y able to admire, even where we cannot equally approve their cause. Courage and self-sacrifice are beautiful alike in an enemy and in a friend. And while we exult in that chivalry with which the Smithfield martyrs bought Eng

gateway of his sanctuary, to awe his remaining monks into obedience; while his head

k family to one Thomas Sutton, a rich and philanthropic Northumbrian coal-owner, who converted it into a "Hospital" for eighty poor men, and a school for forty poor boys. The school, so picturesque in Thackeray's Newcomes, no longer exists here as in old days; in 1872, the modern craze for fresh air transferred it to new premises at Godalming; and the boys' vacated buildings were sold to t

s old school in his touching description of "Founder's Day"; when old Colonel Newcome, in his t

down over his prayer-book; there was no mistaking him. He wore the black gown of the pensioners of the Hospital of Grey Friars. His order of the Bath was on

, "I.H." worked out in red on the bricks in Washhouse Court, (part of the old monastery), though supposed to show the initials of the ma

range things," though he for his part has only come across rats, so far. Perhaps the boys have "laid" them! boys, it must be confessed, would make shor

ssed be t

old Thom

s lodging,

s beef an

ent schools are going, or gone, from the City; St. Paul's School is moved to Hammersmith; the picturesque Christ's Hospital is just disintegrated; its characteristic Lares an

el, of which the groined entrance alone dates from monastic times, contains a splendid alabas

gentlemen of the hospital, listening to the prayers and the psalms. You hear them coughing feebly in the twilight,-the old reverend blackgowns.... A plenty of candles lights up this chapel, and this scene of age and youth, and early memories, and pompous death. How solemn the well-remembered prayers are, here uttered again in the place where in childhood we used to hear them! How beautiful and decorous the rite; how noble the ancient words of the supplications which the priest utters, and to which gene

specimen of the architecture of James's time; an old Hall? many old halls; old staircases, old passages, old chambers decorated with old portraits, walking in the midst of which, we walk as it were in the early seventeenth century." The dining-hall, which used to be the monastic guest-chamber, is used now by the old bedesmen; it is fine, with its dark panelling and its look of comfortable solidity. This was the part

, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said 'Adsum,' and fell back. It was the word we used at s

hly taking in much at one time. Everybody knows that places where you are "shown round" are fatiguing; what you really enjoy is what you can find out for your own poor self. In London streets, the unexpected is always happening; thus, through the hideous plate glass of a bar parlour, you may catch glimpses of waving trees and grey towers, and even the dreadful glare of London adve

te, built by Prior Docwra in 1504. It is a fine bit of perpendicular architecture; on the gateway's north side are the arms of Docwra and of his Order, on the south side, those of France and England. In the centre of the groined roof is the Lamb bearing a flag, kneeling on the Gospels. The rest of the Priory buildings have long vanished; destroyed, for the most part, by the ambitious Protector Somerset, by whose order they were blown up for building materials for his fine new Strand palace. The later history of the old Gate is mainly journalistic; demonstrating that typical change from the calm of conventual seclusion to the thunder of printing-press publicity, so common in central London. Dr. Johnson lived here in his early days of hack work in the old rooms above the Gate, working for Cave the printer, the founder of the Gentleman's Magazine, at so much per sheet, and liv

to choose a fine day for the excursion, a day when those imposing golden letters on the Royal Exchange-the "Anno Elizabethae" and "Anno Victoriae"-glitter like so many suns above the unceasing whirlpool of human life and energy below. Have you ever thought, as you looked on those golden letters, how interesting they ma

gloomy walls of grim Newgate prison; next, the pale, ghost-like spire of St. Mary-le-Bow, shining over its blackened base and the many-coloured street vista below, and, finally, the great civic buildings of the City proper, forming in the sunlight, a sort of white-and-golden circle, a central focusing point of colour and energy, whence diverge, like so many wheel-spokes, all the great business thoroughfares. The stranger, set down here for the first time, generally completely loses his bearings, and even the practised Londoner sometimes finds himself at a loss. (In a "London particular" he may even find himself in a very Inferno.) But the cool inner courtyard of the Roya

he pedestrian, if, indeed, they come upon him at all, as surprises. Of St. Michael's nothing can be seen from the street but its tower and richly-carved modern doorway fixed between two plate-glass shop-fronts. The doorway has projecting heads and a relief of St. Michael weighing souls; a business-like proceeding, I may remark, that well befits the City. Further on, comes St. Peter-upon-Cornhill, the body of the church completely masked by shops, and only the tower to be seen over the roofs from the further side of the street. Most of these City churches are open at mid-day, and the stranger is usually free to walk round and see what he will, without let or hindrance, ignored by the sextoness or pew-opener, who is generally a superior

l lined with polished granite columns in the Byzantine-Romanesque style-a style, one would think, more ecclesiastical than financial. If they had dug this sort of place out of old Pompeii, what would the antiquaries have called it? No statues of Plutus or of Mercury would have helped them to their finding! Alas! in our foggy climate, we dare not indulge ourselves with sculptured Lares a

luded, is, though much repaired and repainted, still dignified; in the interior of the restaurant all details are carefull

read or see, and he had evidently lost himself among the monuments. The sextoness, who was apparently engaged in the careful brushing of her black silk dress in the vestry, was much too superior to notice him. St. Helen's is a dark church at any time; on this occasion a "London particular" was also impending, and even the gold letters on Sir Thomas Gresham's massive tomb scarcely showed in the fading light. But it was a picturesque scene, despite the sad lack of "glory on the walls." The old knights and ladies, motionless on their narrow beds, glimmered in ghostly fashion, silent witnesses of the flight of the centuries. The quaint, stiff effigies, clad in ruff and farthingale,-while they have knelt there, how many generations, in the turbulent world outside, have been born and died? Bancroft'

t that Julius Caesar

ion, I sympathised duly with the large family of "John Robinson, alderman," whose children form a long kneeling procession behind him; and still more did I mourn for those unhappy nuns who, poor things, were immured in the darkness behind "the Nuns' Grate," or "hagioscope"; their scant peepholes so unkindly devised that they could only see the altar, and not the congregation! Thes

orne among you, except at Christmasse, and other honest tymys of rec

he church is neatly kept, and on my last visit I noticed some gardeners putting in a plentiful supply of bulbs for spring blooming. Doubtless, the "Black Nuns" enjoyed among their other "recreacyones

66. I passed it three times without noticing it, for its little spirelet rises but slightly above the roofs of the intervening shops, and its tiny doorway, labelled itself like a small shop, is easily overlooked between two projecting windows. (The smallness of the pla

near by, the Jewish quarter of St. Mary Axe, "Rag Fair," and Petticoat Lane (now Middlesex Street), noted, like Brick Lane, Spi

Mary Axe, o

othes they'd ev

ckens's unsavoury characters, Miss Sally Brass and her brother Sampson (in The Old Curiosity Shop). Here, once again, Dickens gets thoroughly the strange, semi-human spirit of London slums and by-ways; it is in such places tha

the two steps which lead from the side-walk to the office door, and so close on the

u would expect; the very name has a moneyed ring about it! The derivation of the name, by-the-way, is curious; it comes from Lombard bankers who appear to have settled here at an early date; the street bore their name in the reign of Edward II. The square tower, crowned by an octagonal spire, that rises on the north side of Lombard Street, is that of the church of St. Edmund the King and Martyr, in which was made poor Addison's not too happy marriage with the Dowager Countess of Warwick and Holland. Still continuing east, past Gracechurch Street, we come to Fenchurch Street, a thoroughfare that runs parallel with the busy mart of East

urch itself was threatened, but fortunately escaped; but the streets, now rebuilt, look, thanks to the City's wonderful recuperative powers, as solid and as flourishing as ever. The noisy thoroughfare of Fore Street, lined with warehouses and foundries, is built upon the ancient line of wall, which also appears, black against sunflowers, asters, and greenery, in St. Giles's churchyard and rectory garden. This part of the City wall is probably of Edward IV.'s time. Portions of the old Roman wall have indeed been discovered here and there in the City; a large fragment of it was, for instance, laid bare at the building of the new depar

churchyard of St. Alphage over the way. They are railed in from injury, and a memorial tablet is affixed. The dwellers in the district still, however, seem densely ignorant as to its meaning. I lately asked several youthful inhabita

as, indeed, the one merit of being so small as easily to escape notice; though hardly its ancient foundation, or the interesting

r of their long day is ended, and they are left to silence. The busy throng of workers hurries homeward; soon, in the highways scarcely a belated footfall resounds, while in the byways, by d

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