CHAPTER XXIV.

THE STREETS AND PUBLIC BUILDINGS.

INTRODUCTORY.`

"You only find in Rome what you take thither," said Goethe.

In Goethe's sense you only gather in the streets of London what you take into them, what you have heard or read about them.

An hour or two in a library with the works of Cunningham, Leigh Hunt, Jesse, or Timbs, is about the best preparation one can have for a ramble through the London streets. If the visitor looks forward to finding now many of the once familiar vestiges of Old London-familiar even to us of to-day--he will be disappointed. It is true we may still point with pride to a few splendid monuments of bygone centuries-the "Minster of the West"; the Hall of William the Red; the Round of the Templars; and the Tower of William the Norman; but of buildings of lesser fame and out-of-the-way works of interest, old houses, old inns, old shops, and the like, the rambler in search of the picturesque will find but few remaining.

To the historical student, of course, the streets of London are paved with memories. Dr. Johnson, when he took his walk, down Fleet Street, passed from end to end of it as he might have paced from end to end of his library. Each side of the road was full of suggestions to his well-stored mind, and spoke of men and things perhaps unheard-of by the companion of his ramble. In like manner may the student of the present-the student versed in the rich antiquarian lore of London of the past-trace the plan of the Roman city, identify the sites of buildings of Norman and Tudor times, and of what were once

the homes, birthplaces, or graves (since many of the old churchyards are now made over as gardens to the poor) of those whose fame is written in the pages of England's own eventful story. But he must no longer expect to eat his dinner in the Thatched House Tavern or Turk's Head of Johnson's day, or sit in the little room where Marvell refused the bribe of Danby, or stand within the railed gallery looking down upon the courtyard of the Belle Sauvage Inn. He may be directed to the spots where once these stood; but every vestige of the buildings sacred to such memories has disappeared under the rapidly destructive influences of metropolitan and city improvements.

One of Lamb's friends (Godwin) proposed a subscription to all well-disposed people, “to raise a certain sum of money to be expended in the care of a cheap monument for the former and the future great dead men. The monument to be a white cross with a wooden slab at the end telling their names and qualifications." This wooden slab and white cross to be perpetuated to the end of time; to survive, as Lamb humorously. writes, the fall of empires and the destruction of cities, by means of a map which in case of an insurrection or any other cause by which a city or country may be destroyed, was to be carefully preserved. When things got again into their regular order, the white-cross-wooden-slab-makers were to go to work again and re-establish the wooden slabs in their former places. Charles Lamb cuts a joke at the project in his kindly way, and tells how his friend wrote a pamphlet of many pages in its favour. But if such a map had been drawn-a map on the scale of the splendid sheet published by the proprietors of the London Graphic, "London, as seen from a Balloon, 1884,”— indicating the exact sizes of the various birthplaces, some time dwellings, chambers, lodgings, etc., of the great men who once. flourished in London, what an interesting record we should have! We might, for example, have taken in at a glance the whole domestic career of Lamb himself, beginning with the lodgings at No. 7, Little Queen Street, Holborn, through his

several removals - Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane; Mitre Court, Temple; 4, Inner Temple Lane; 20, Russell Street, Covent Garden; to Enfield; and, lastly, to Church Street, Edmonton. We might have traced Thackeray through his wanderings from street to street, Dickens through his, and all the other great writers, whom we love to think about in our ramblings over London, through theirs. As it is, we have to go to innumerable books for a key to each particular house, and even then we may miss it.*

Like all other cities and towns, the great city had a beginning. The original Llyn-din, or Fort of the Lake, a collection of rude huts set upon one of two or three knolls, rising out of fens, salt estuaries, and tidal swamps, denotes that beginning. This gave place to Roman London, of which we may yet trace the plan, and show many relics to this day. We have still the Roman milestone, fragments of Roman walls and of Roman houses, and the line of Roman streets. In Cripplegate, for example, not far from the General Post Office, may yet be seen a splendid specimen of the original Roman wall. The Londoner may (or until lately could) lave his limbs in a genuine Roman bath of icy water, for the trouble of turning a few paces down Strand Lane. One of the only two Roman milestones in Britain remains in Cannon Street, the other being at Chesterholm in Northumberland. There is Roman work about the Tower. Until quite recently an old Roman turret was standing within a hundred yards of Ludgate Hill Station. These and other remains faintly attest the perfection to which our first conquerors brought the system of colonisation. The visitor may view, in the museum of the Guildhall of London, statues, pavements, altars, domestic utensils, which have been found in Leadenhall Street, in Lime Street, in Lombard Street, in Broad Street—their shapes and their colours almost as fresh as when interred. A recent writer (it is impossible to give his name, since he appears anonymously in

* Since this was written Mr. Laurence Hutton's "Literary Landmarks of London" has been published,

the columns of a London newspaper),* remarks :—“ It would be a curious task, albeit an almost impossible one, to map out Roman London as the Rome of the Cæsars is mapped out-to see the temple of Diana standing hard by what the stone in Panyer Alley† says is the highest ground in the City;

'When you have sought the city round,

Yet still this is the highest ground;'

to trace the street which converged at the milestone in Cannon Street-the Watling Street coming from the south and proceeding again north-west; the Ermine and Stane Streets from the south-east; the North Road running to the ancient colonial capital; the east road going to Colchester; to place the pleasant villas along the Wall-brook, § and the Old Bourne ;|| to see the great citadel in its entirety, and to follow the sturdy wall with its turrets and gates around the city. If, as archæologists aver, the great Roman temple stood where now stands the chief Protestant Cathedral of the world; if the ancient London Forum was where is now the Royal Exchange; if the chief Roman cemeteries were on the sites of the Bunhill Fields buryingground and St. Sepulchre's Church;¶ if the Roman citadel was where now stands the Tower of London-it is sufficient proof that posterity has been faithful to the lines laid down by the old Roman colonists. The great arteries of London run almost precisely upon the line of the great Roman arteries; we have still a Watling Street and a Stone Street; the Gray's Inn Road, formerly in the North Road, was known before the railway era as

* Globe, April 5th, 1884.

† A street leading out of Cannon Street towards St. Paul's.

A narrow thoroughfare between Paternoster Row and Newgate Street. A stone built into one of the houses on the east side bears the inscription.

§ Walbrook, a street on the west side of the Mansion House.

|| Holborn.

¶ St. Sepulchre's Church stands at the western end of Newgate Street.