passed by. Bloomsbury Square was built by the Earl of Southampton, about the time of the Restoration, and was thought one of the wonders of England. Baxter lived here when he was tormented by Judge Jefferies; Sir Hans Sloane was one of its inhabitants; so was that great physician, Dr. Radcliffe, The burning of Mansfield House by Lord George Gordon's rioters has to be minutely described. In Russell Square we visit the houses of Sir Thomas Lawrence and of Judge Talfourd, and search for Sir Cloudesley Shovel, Sir Joseph Banks, and Burnet, the historian, were all inhabitants of this locality. Islington brings us back to days when Henry VIII. came there to hawk the partridge and the heron, and when the London citizens wandered out across the northern fields to drink milk and eat cheesecakes. The old houses abound in legends of Sir Walter Raleigh, Topham, the strong man, George Morland, the artist, and Henderson, the actor. At Canonbury, the old tower of the country house of that celebrated spot in London legend, "The Field of the Forty Footsteps," where two brothers, it is said, killed each other in a duel for a lady, who sat by watching the fight. Then there is Red Lion Square, where tradition says some faithful adherents, at the Restoration, buried the body of Cromwell, to prevent its desecration at Tyburn; and we have to cull some stories of a good old inhabitant, Jonas Hanway, the great promoter of many of the London charities, the first man who habitually used an umbrella and Dr. Johnson's spirited opponent on the important question of tea. Soho Square, too, has many a tradition, for the Duke of Monmouth lived there in great splendour; and in Hogarth's time Mrs. Cornelys made the square celebrated by her masquerades, which in time became disreputable. the Prior of St. Bartholomew recalls to us Goldsmith, who used to come there to hide from his creditors, go to bed early, and write steadily. At Highgate and Hampstead we shall scour the northern uplands of London by no means in vain, as we shall find Belsize House, in Charles II.'s time, openly besieged by robbers and, long afterwards, highwaymen swarming in the same locality. The chalybeate wells of Hampstead lead us on to the Heath, where wolves were to be found in the twelfth century and highwaymen as late as 1803. Good company awaits us at pleasant Hampstead Lord Erskine, Lord Chatham, Keats, Akenside, Leigh Hunt, and Sir T. Fowell Buxton; Booth, Wilkes, and Colley Cibber; Mrs. Barbauld, honest Dick Steele, and Joanna Baillie. As for Highgate, for ages a mere hamlet, a forest, it once boasted a bishop's palace, and there we gather, with free hand, memories of Sacheverell, Rowe, Dr. Watts, Hogarth, Coleridge, and Lord Mansfield; Ireton, Marvell, and Dick Whittington, the worthy demi-god of London apprentices to the end of time. Lambeth, where Harold was crowned, can hold its own in interest with any part of London-for it once possessed two ecclesiastical palaces and many places of amusement. Lambeth Palace itself is a spot of extreme interest. Here Wat Tyler's men dragged off Archbishop Sudbury to execution; here, when Laud was seized, the Parliamentary soldiers turned the palace into a prison for Royalists and demolished the great hall. Outside the walls of the church James II.'s Queen cowered in the December rain with her child, till a coach could be brought from the neighbouring inn to convey her to Gravesend to take ship for France. The Gordon rioters attacked the palace in 1780, but were driven off by a detachment of Guards. The Lollards' Tower has to be visited, and the sayings and doings of a long line of prelates to be reviewed. Vauxhall brings us back to the days when Walpole went there with Lady Caroline Petersham and helped to stew chickens in a china dish over a lamp; or we go further back and accompany Addison and the worthy Sir Roger de Coverley, and join them over a glass of good ale and a slice of hung beef. Astley's Amphitheatre recalls to us many amusing stories of that old soldier, Ducrow, and of his friends and rivals, which join on very naturally to those other theatrical traditions to which Drury Lane and Covent Garden have already led us. So we mean to roam from flower to flower, over as varied a garden as the imagination can well conceive. There have been brave workers before us in the field, and we shall build upon good foundations. We hope to be catholic in our selections; we shall prune away only the superfluous; we shall condense anecdotes only where we think we can make them pithier and racier. We will neglect no fact that is interesting, and blend together all that old Time can give us bearing upon London. Street by street we shall delve and rake for illustrative story, despising no book, however humble, no pamphlet, however obscure, if it only throws some light on the celebrities of London, its topographical history, its manners and customs. Such is a brief summary of our plan. St. Paul's rises before us with its great black dome and stately row of sable columns; the Tower, with its central citadel, flanked by the spear-like masts of the river shipping; the great world of roofs spreads below us as we launch upon our venturous voyage of discovery. From Boadicea leading on her scythed chariots at Battle Bridge to Queen Victoria in the Thanksgiving procession of yesterday is a long period over which to range. We have whole generations of Londoners to defile before us-painted Britons, hooded Saxons, mailed Crusaders, Chaucer's men in hoods, friars, citizens, warriors, Shakespeare's friends, Johnson's companions, Goldsmith's jovial "Bohemians," Hogarth's fellow-painters, soldiers, lawyers, statesmen, merchants. Nevertheless, at our spells they will gather from the four winds, and at our command march off to their old billets in their old houses, where we may best cross-examine them and collect their impressions of the life of their times. The subject is as entertaining as any dream Imagination ever evoked and as varied as human nature. Its classification is a certain bond of union, and will act as an excellent cement for the multiform stones with which we shall rear our building. Lists of names, dry pedigrees, rows of dates, we leave to the herald and the topographer; but we shall pass by little that can throw light on the history of London in any generation, and we shall dwell more especially on the events of the later centuries, because they are more akin to us and are bound to us by closer sympathies. Buried London-Our Early Relations-The Founder of London-A distinguished Visitor at Romney Marsh-Cæsar re-visits the "Town on the Lake"-The Borders of Old London-Cæsar fails to make much out of the Britons-King Brown-The Derivation of the name of London -The Queen of the Iceni-London Stone and London Roads-London's Earlier and Newer Walls-The Site of St. Paul's-Fabulous Claims to Idolatrous Renown-Existing Relics of Roman London-Treasures from the Bed of the Thames-What we Tread underfoot in London -A vast Field of Story. EIGHTEEN feet below the level of Cheapside lies | City there have been discovered tesselated pavehidden Roman London, and deeper even than that is buried the earlier London of those savage charioteers who, long ages ago, bravely confronted the legions of Rome. In nearly all parts of the ments, Roman tombs, lamps, vases, sandals, keys, ornaments, weapons, coins, and statues of the ancient Roman gods. So the present has grown up upon the ashes of the past. But descending quick to the lower but safer and firmer ground of fact, let us cautiously drive our first pile into the shaky morass of early London history. Trees that are to live long grow slowly. Slow nations that crowded into Troy or swarmed under and stately as an oak London grew and grew, till its walls; but, alas for them, that line was never now nearly four million souls represent its leaves. | written! No, Founder of London! thy name was Our London is very old. Centuries before Christ written on fluid ooze of the marsh, and the first there probably came the first few half-naked fisher- tide that washed over it from the Nore obliterated men and hunters, who reared, with flint axes and it for ever. Yet, perhaps even now thou sleepest such rude tools, some miserable huts on the rising as quietly fathoms deep in soft mud, in some still ground that, forming the north bank of the Thames, nook of Barking Creek, as if all the world were slopes to the river some sixty miles from where it ringing with thy glory. joins the sea. According to some, the river spread out like a vast lake between the Surrey and the Essex hills in those times when the first half-savage settlers found the low slopes of the future London places of health and defence amid a vast and dismal region of fen, swamp, and forest. The heroism and the cruelties, the hopes and fears of those poor barbarians, darkness never to be removed has hidden from us for ever. In later days monkish historians, whom Milton afterwards followed, ignored these poor early relations of ours, and invented, as a more fitting ancestor of Englishmen, Brute, a fugitive nephew of Æneas of Troy. But, stroll on where we will, the pertinacious savage, with his limbs stained blue and his flint axe red with blood, is a ghost not easily to be exorcised from the banks of the Thames, and in some Welsh veins his blood no doubt flows at this very day. The founder of London had no historian to record his hopes a place where big salmon were to be found, and plenty of wild boars were to be met with, was probably his highest ambition. How he bartered with Phoenicians or Gauls for amber or iron no Druid has recorded. How he slew the foraging Belgæ, or was slain by them and dispossessed, no bard has sung. Whether he was generous and heroic as the New Zealander, or apelike and thievish as the Bushman, no ethnologist has yet proved. The very ashes of the founder of London have long since turned to earth, air, and water. : A learned modern antiquary, Thomas Lewin, has proved, as nearly as any such things can be proved, that Julius Cæsar and 8,000 men, who had sailed from Boulogne, landed near Romney Marsh about half-past five o'clock on Sunday the 27th of August, 55 years before the birth of our Saviour. Centuries before that very remarkable August day on which the brave standard-bearer of Cæsar's Tenth Legion sprang from his gilt galley into the sea and, eagle in hand, advanced against the javelins of the painted Britons who lined the shore, there is now no doubt London was already existing as a British town of some importance, and known to the fishermen and merchants of the Gauls and Belgians. Strabo, a Greek geographer who flourished in the reign of Augustus, speaks of British merchants as bringing to the Seine and the Rhine shiploads of corn, cattle, iron, hides, slaves, and dogs, and taking back brass, ivory, amber ornaments, and vessels of glass. By these merchants the desirability of such a depôt as London, with its great and always navigable river, could not have been long overlooked. In Cæsar's second and longer invasion in the next year (54 B.C.), when his 28 many-oared triremes and 560 transports, &c., in all 800, poured on the same Kentish coast 21,000 legionaries and No doubt the few huts that formed early London 2,000 cavalry, there is little doubt that his strong were fought for over and over again, as wolves foot left its imprint near that cluster of stockaded wrangle round a carcass. On Cornhill there pro- huts (more resembling a New Zealand pah than bably dwelt petty kings who warred with the kings a modern English town) perhaps already called of Ludgate; and in Southwark there lurked or bur- London-Llyn-don, the 66 town on the lake." rowed other chiefs who, perhaps by intrigue or After a battle at Challock Wood, Cæsar and his force, struggled for centuries to get a foothold in men crossed the Thames, as is supposed, at Coway Thames Street. But to such infusoria History Stakes, an ancient ford a little above Walton (glorying only in offenders, criminals, and robbers and below Weybridge. Cassivellaunus, King of on the largest scale) justly pays no heed. This alone Hertfordshire and Middlesex, had just slain in we know, that the early rulers of London before war Immanuent, King of Essex, and had driven out the Christian era passed away like the wild beasts his son Mandubert. The Trinobantes, Manduthey fought and slew, and their very names have bert's subjects, joined the Roman spearmen against perished. One line of an old blind Greek poet the 4,000 scythed chariots of Cassivellaunus and might have immortalised them among the motley the Catyeuchlani. Straight as the flight of an arrow was Cæsar's march upon the capital of Cassivellaunus, a city the barbaric name of which he either forgot or disregarded, but which he merely says was "protected by woods and marshes." This place north of the Thames has usually been thought to be Verulamium (St. Alban's); but it was far more likely London, as the Cassii, whose capital was Verulamium, were among the traitorous tribes who joined Cæsar against their oppressor Cassivellaunus. Moreover, Cæsar's brief description of the spot perfectly applies to Roman London, for least is certain, that the legionaries carried their eagles swiftly over his stockades of earth and fallen trees, drove away the blue-stained warriors, and swept off the half-wild cattle stored up by the Britons. Shortly after, Cæsar returned to Gaul, having heard while in Britain of the death of his favourite daughter Julia, the wife of Pompey, his great rival. His camp at Richborough or Rutupia was far distant; the dreaded equinoctial gales were at hand; and Gaul, he knew, might at any moment of his absence start into a flame. His inglorious ANCIENT ROMAN PAVEMENT FOUND IN THREADNEEDLE STREET, 1841 (see page 21). ages protected on the north by a vast forest, full of deer and wild boars, and which, even as late as the reign of Henry II., covered a great region, but has now shrunk into the not very wild districts of St. John's Wood and Caen Wood. On the north the town found a natural moat in the broad fens of Moorfields, Finsbury, and Houndsditch, while on the south ran the Fleet and the Old Bourne. Indeed, according to that credulous enthusiast, Stukeley, Cæsar, marching from Staines to London, encamped on the site of Old St. Pancras Church, round which edifice Stukeley found evident traces of a great Prætorian camp. However, whether Cassivellaunus, the King of Middlesex and Hertfordshire, had his capital at London or St. Alban's, this much at campaign had lasted just four months and a halfhis first had been far shorter. As Cæsar himself wrote to Cicero, our rude island was defended by stupendous rocks, there was not a scrap of the gold that had been reported, and the only prospect of booty was in slaves, from whom there could be expected neither "skill in letters nor in music." In sober truth, all Cæsar had won from the people of Kent and Hertfordshire had been blows and buffets, for there were men in Britain even then. The prowess of the British charioteers became a standing joke in Rome against the soldiers of Cæsar. Horace and Tibullus both speak of the Briton as unconquered. The bow which the strong Roman hand had for a moment bent quickly of Brute of Troy. The successor of the warlike Cassivellaunus had his capital at St. Alban's; his son Cunobelin (Shakespeare's Cymbeline)-a name which seems to glow with perpetual sunshine as we write it had a palace at Colchester; and the son of Cunobelin. was the famed Caradoc, or Caractacus, that hero of the Silures, who struggled bravely for nine long years against the generals of Rome. Celtic etymologists differ, as etymologists usually do, about the derivation of the name of London. Lon, or Long, meant, they say, either a lake, a wood, a populous place, a plain, or a ship-town. This last by fens on the north; and on the east by the marshy low ground of Wapping. It was a high, dry, and fortified point of communication between the river and the inland country of Essex and Hertfordshire, a safe sixty miles from the sea, and central as a depôt and meeting-place for the tribes of Kent and Middlesex. Hitherto the London about which we have been conjecturing has been a mere cloud city. The first mention of real London is by Tacitus, who, writing in the reign of Nero (A.D. 62, more than a century after the landing of Cæsar), in that style of his so full of vigour and so sharp in outline, |