ladies more to dawnce the measures. Mrs. Fitton Sunday, November 19, 1769. It was built from went to the queen and woed her dawnce. Her the design of Robert Mylne, a clever young majesty (the love of Essex rankling in her heart) Scotch engineer, whose family had been master asked what she was? Affection," she said. masons to the kings of Scotland for five hundred "Affection" said the queen; "affection is false; years. Mylne had just returned from a provet her majestie rose up and dawnced.' At this fessional tour in Italy, where he had followed in

LAYING THE FOUNDATION-STONE OF BLACKFRIARS BRIDGE, 1760. From a Contemporary Print.
(See page 206.)

time the queen was sixty. Surely, as Mr. Walpole | the footsteps of Vitruvius, and gained the first
observed, it was at that period as natural for her
as to be in love! I must not forget that in her
passage from the bride's to Lord Cobham's she
went through the house of Dr. Puddin, and was
presented by the doctor with a fan."

Old Blackfriars Bridge, pulled down a few years since, was begun in 1760, and first opened on

prize at the Academy of St. Luke. He arrived in London friendless and unknown, and at once entered into competition with twenty other architects for the new bridge. Among these rivals was Smeaton, the great engineer (a protegé of Lord Bute), and Dr. Johnson's friend, Gwynn, well known for his admirable work on London improve

In the face of this noisy newspaper thunder, Mylne went on, and produced one of the most beautiful bridges in England for £152,640 35. 10d., actually £163 less than the original estimate—an admirable example for all architects, present and to come. The bridge, which had nine arches, and was 995 yards from wharf to wharf, was erected in ten years and three quarters. Mylne received £500 a year and ten per cent. on the expenditure. His claims, however, were disputed, and not allowed by the grateful City till 1776. The bridge-tolls were bought by Government in 1785, and the passage then became free. It was afterwards lowered, and the open parapet, condemned by Johnson, removed. It was supposed that Mylne's mode of centreing was a secret, but in contempt of all quackery he deposited exact models of his system in the British Museum. He was afterwards made surveyor of St. Paul's Cathedral, and in 1811 was interred near the tomb of Wren. He was a despot amongst his workmen, and ruled them with a rod of iron. However, the foundations of this bridge were never safely built, and latterly the piers began visibly to subside. The semi-circular arches would have been far stronger.

ments. The committee were, however, just enough loaded will be itself part of the load. The semito be unanimous in favouring the young unknown elliptical arch has one recommendation yet unScotchman, and he carried off the prize. Directly examined. We are told that it is difficult of it was known that Mylne's arches were to be execution.” elliptical, every one unacquainted with the subject began to write in favour of the semi-circular arch. Among the champions Dr. Johnson was, if not the most ignorant, the most rash. He wrote three letters to the printer of the Gazetteer, praising Gwynn's plans and denouncing the Scotch conqueror. Gwynn had "coached" the learned Doctor in a very unsatisfactory way. In his early days the giant of Bolt Court had been accustomed to get up subjects rapidly, but the science of architecture was not so easily digested. The Doctor contended that the first excellence of a bridge built for commerce over a large river is strength." So far so good; but he then went on to try and show that the pointed arch is necessarily weak, and here he himself broke down. He allowed that there was an elliptical bridge at Florence, but he said carts were not allowed to go over it, which proved its fragility. He also condemned a proposed castiron parapet, in imitation of one at Rome, as too poor and trifling for a great design. He allowed that a certain arch of Perault's was elliptical, but then he contended that it had to be held together by iron clamps. He allowed that Mr. Mylne had gained the prize at Rome, but the competitors, the arrogant despot of London clubs asserted, were The foundation-stone of Blackfriars Bridge was only boys; and, moreover, architecture had sunk laid by Sir Thomas Chitty, Lord Mayor, on the so low at Rome, that even the Pantheon had been 31st of October, 1760. Horace Walpole, always deformed by petty decorations. In his third letter Whiggish, describing the event, says: "The Lord the Doctor grew more scientific, and even more Mayor laid the first stone of the new bridge yesterconfused. He was very angry with Mr. Mylne's day. There is an inscription on it in honour of friends for asserting that though a semi-ellipse Mr. Pitt, which has a very Roman air, though very might be weaker than a semicircle, it had quite unclassically expressed. They talk of the contastrength enough to support a bridge. "I again gion of his public spirit; I believe they had not got venture to declare,” he wrote—“I again venture to rid of their panic about mad dogs." Several gold, declare, in defiance of all this contemptuous supe- silver, and copper coins of the reign of George II. riority" (how arrogant men hate other people's (just dead) were placed under the stone, with a arrogance !), "that a straight line will bear no weight. silver medal presented to Mr. Mylne by the Not even the science of Vasari will make that form Academy of St. Luke's, and upon two plates of tin strong which the laws of nature have condemned-Bonnel Thornton said they should have been to weakness. By the position that a straight line lead-was engraved a very shaky Latin inscripwill bear nothing is meant that it receives no tion, thus rendered into English :strength from straightness; for that many bodies laid in straight lines will support weight by the cohesion of their parts, every one has found who has seen dishes on a shelf, or a thief upon the gallows. It is not denied that stones may be so crushed together by enormous pressure on each side, that a heavy mass may be safely laid upon them; but the strength must be derived merely from the lateral resistance, and the line so

On the last day of October, in the year 1760, And in the beginning of the most auspicious reign of GEORGE the Third,

Sir THOMAS CHITTY, Knight, Lord Mayor, laid the first stone of this Bridge, undertaken by the Common Council of London (amidst the rage of an extensive war) for the public accommodation and ornament of the City; ROBERT MYLNE being the architect.

And that there might remain to posterity
a monument of this city's affection to the man
who, by the strength of his genius,

the steadiness of his mind,

and a certain kind of happy contagion of his
Probity and Spirit

(under the Divine favour

and fortunate auspices of GEORGE the Second) recovered, augmented, and secured

the British Empire

in Asia, Africa, and America,

and restored the ancient reputation

and influence of his country

amongst the nations of Europe; the citizens of London have unanimously voted this Bridge to be inscribed with the name of WILLIAM PITT.

On this pretentious and unlucky inscription, that reckless wit, Bonnel Thornton, instantly wrote a squib, under the obvious pseudonym of the "Rev. Busby Birch." In these critical and political remarks (which he entitled "City Latin ") the gay scoffer professed in his preface to prove "almost every word and every letter to be erroneous and contrary to the practice of both ancients and moderns in this kind of writing," and appended a plan or pattern for a new inscription. The clever little lampoon soon ran to three editions. The ordinary of Newgate, my lord's chaplain, or the masters of Merchant Taylors', Paul's, or Charterhouse schools, who produced the wonderful pontine inscription, must have winced under the blows of this jester's bladderful of peas. Thornton laughed most at the awkward phrase implying that Mr. Pitt had caught the happy contagion of his own probity and spirit. He said that "Gulielmi Pitt" should have been "Gulielmi Fossæ." Lastly, he proposed, for a more curt and suitable inscription, the simple words—

"GUIL. FOSSÆ,

Patri Patriæ D.D.D. (i.e., Datur, Dicatur, Dedicatur)." Party feeling, as usual at those times, was rife. Mylne was a friend of Paterson, the City solicitor, an apt scribbler and a friend of Lord Bute, who no doubt favoured his young countryman. For, being a Scotchman, Johnson no doubt took pleasure in opposing him, and for the same reason Churchill, in his bitter poem on the Cock Lane ghost, after ridiculing Johnson's credulity, goes out of his way to sneer at Mylne :—

"What of that bridge which, void of sense,
But well supplied with impudence,
Englishmen, knowing not the Guild,
Thought they might have the claim to build;
Till Paterson, as white as milk,
As smooth as oil, as soft as silk,

In solemn manner had decreed

That, on the other side the Tweed,

Art, born and bred and fully grown,
Was with one Mylne, a man unknown?
But grace, preferment, and renown
Deserving, just arrived in town;
One Mylne, an artist, perfect quite,
Both in his own and country's right,
As fit to make a bridge as he,
With glorious Patavinity,

To build inscriptions, worthy found
To lie for ever underground."

In 1766 the bridge was opened for foot passengers, the completed portion being connected with the shore by a wooden structure; two years later it was made passable for horses, and in 1769 it was fully opened. An unpopular toll of one halfpenny on week-days for every person, and of one penny on Sundays, was exacted. The result of this was that while the Gordon Riots were raging, in 1780, the too zealous Protestants, forgetting for a time the poor tormented Papists, attacked and burned down the toll-gates, stole the money, and destroyed all the account-books. Several rascals lost their lives, and one rioter, being struck with a bullet, ran howling for thirty or forty yards, and then dropped down dead. Nevertheless, the obnoxious toll continued until 1785, when it was redeemed by Government.

The bridge, according to the order of Common Council, was first named Pitt Bridge, and the adjacent streets (in honour of the great earl) Chatham Place, William Street, and Earl Street. But the first name of the bridge soon dropped off, and the monastic locality asserted its prior right. This is the more remarkable (as Mr. Timbs judiciously observes), because with another Thames bridge the reverse change took place. Waterloo Bridge was first called Strand Bridge, but it was soon dedicated by the people to the memory of the most famous of British victories.

The £152,640 that the bridge cost does not include the £5,830 spent in altering and filling up the Fleet Ditch, or the £2,167 the cost of the temporary wooden bridge. The piers, of bad Portland stone, were decorated by some columns of unequal sizes, and the line of parapet was low and curved. The approaches to the bridge were also designed by Mylne, who built himself a house at the corner of Little Bridge Street. The walls of the rooms were adorned with classical medallions, and on the exterior was the date (1780), with Mylne's crest, and the initials "R. M." Dr. Johnson became a friend of Mylne, and dined with him at this residence at least on one occasion. The house afterwards became the "York Hotel," and eventually was taken down in 1863.

The repairs of the Bridge between 1833 and

prize. Cubitt's bridge has five arches, the centre one eighty-nine feet span; the style, Venetian Gothic; the cost, £265,000. The piers are grey, the columns red, granite; the bases and capitals are of carved Portland stone; the bases, balustrades, and roads of somewhat over-ornamented iron.

1840, by Walker and Burgess, engineers, at an ex- somest and cheapest. It consisted of only three pense of £74,000, produced a loss to the contrac- arches. Ultimately Mr. Joseph Cubitt won the tors; and the removal of the cornice and balustrade spoiled the bridge whither old Richard Wilson, the landscape-painter, used to come and admire the grand view of St. Paul's. The bridge seemed to be as unlucky as if it had incurred Dr. Johnson's curse. In 1843 the Chamberlain reported to the Common Council that the sum of £100,960 had been already expended in repairing Mylne's faulty work, besides the £800 spent in procuring a local Act (4 William IV.). According to a subsequent report, £10,200 had been spent in six years in repairing one arch alone. From 1851 to 1859 the expenditure had been at the rate of £600 a year. Boswell, indeed, with all his zealous partiality for the Scotch architect, had allowed that the best Portland stone belonged to Government quarries, and from this Parliamentary interest had debarred Mylne.

The Quarterly Review, of April, 1872, contains the following bitter criticisms of the new double bridge :-"With Blackfriars Bridge," says the writer, "we find the public thoroughly well pleased, though the design is really a wonder of depravity. Polished granite columns of amazing thickness, with carved capitals of stupendous weight, all made to give shop-room for an apple-woman, or a convenient platform for a suicide. The parapet is a fiddlefaddle of pretty cast-iron arcading, out of scale with the columns, incongruous with the capitals, and quite unsuited for a work that should be simply grand in its usefulness; and at each corner of the bridge is a huge block of masonry, apropos of nothing, a well-known evidence of desperate im

Bridge Street is too new for many traditions. Its chief hero is that active-minded and somewhat shallow speculator, Sir Richard Phillips, the bookseller and projector. An interesting memoir by Mr. Timbs, his friend, furnishes us with many curious facts about him, and shows how the publisher of Bridge Street impinged on many of the most illustrious of his contemporaries, and how in a way he pushed forward the good work which afterwards owed so much to Mr. Charles Knight. Phillips, born in London in 1767, was educated in Soho Square, and afterwards at Chiswick, where he remembered often seeing Hogarth's widow and Dr. Griffith, of the Monthly Review (Goldsmith's tyrant), attending church. He was brought up to be a brewer, but in 1788 settled as a schoolmaster, first at Chester and afterwards at Leicester. At Leicester he opened

The tardy Common Council was at last forced, in common decency, to build a new bridge. The architect began by building a temporary structure of great strength. It consisted of two storeysthe lower for carriages, the upper for pedestrians-becility." and stretching 990 feet from wharf to wharf. The lower piles were driven ten feet into the bed of the river, and braced with horizontal and diagonal bracings. The demolition began with vigour in 1864. In four months only, the navigators' brawny arms had removed twenty thousand tons of earth, stone, and rubble above the turning of the arches, and the pulling down those enemies of Dr. Johnson commenced by the removal of the key-stone of the second arch on the Surrey side. The masonry of the arches proved to be rather thinner than it appeared to be, and was stuffed with river ballast, mixed with bones and small old-fashioned pipes. The bridge had taken nearly ten years to build; it was entirely demolished in less than a year, and rebuilt in two. In some cases the work of removal and re-construction went on harmoniously and simultaneously side by side. Ingenious steam a bookseller's shop, started a newspaper (the cranes travelled upon rails laid on the upper scaffold beams, and lifted the blocks of stone with playful ease and speed. In December, 1864, the men worked in the evenings, by the aid of naphtha lamps.

Leicester Herald), and established a philosophical society. Obnoxious as a Radical, he was at last entrapped for selling Tom Paine's "Rights of Man," and was sent to gaol for eighteen months, where he was visited by Lord Moira, the Duke of Norfolk, and other advanced men of the day. house being burned down, he removed to London, and projected a Sunday newspaper, but eventually Mr. Bell stole the idea and started the Twelve designs had been sent in at the competi- Messenger. In 1795 this restless and energetic tion, and, singularly enough, among the competitors man commenced the Monthly Magazine. Before was a Mr. Mylne, grandson of Johnson's foe. The this he had already been a hosier, a tutor, and a design of Mr. Page was first selected, as the hand-speculator in canals. The politico-literary magazine

According to a report printed in the Times, Blackfriars Bridge had suffered from the removal of London Bridge, which served as a mill-dam, to restrain the speed and scour of the river.

Divine philosophy, and to suggest (as he asserted) to Mr. Brougham, in 1825, the first idea of the Society for Useful Knowledge. Almost ruined by the failures during the panic in 1826, he retired to Brighton, and there pushed forward his books and his interrogative system of education. Sir Richard's greatest mistakes, he used to say, had been the rejection of Byron's early poems, of "Waverley,"

was advertised by circulars sent to eminent men of the opposition in commercial parcels, to save the enormous postage of those unregenerate days. Dr. Aiken, the literary editor, afterwards started a rival magazine, called the Athenæum. The Gentleman's Magazine never rose to a circulation above 10,000, which soon sank to 3,000. Phillips's magazine sold about 3,750. With all these multifarious pursuits, Phillips was an antiquary-purchasing of Bloomfield's "Farmer's Boy," and O'Meara's Wolsey's skull for a shilling, a portion of his stone coffin, that had been turned into a horse-trough at the "White Horse" inn, Leicester; and Rufus's stirrup, from a descendant of the charcoal-burner who drove the body of the slain king to Winchester.

"Napoleon in Exile." He always stoutly maintained his claim to the suggestion of the "Percy Anecdotes." Phillips died in 1840. Superficial as he was, and commercial as were his literary aims, we nevertheless cannot refuse him the praise awarded in his epitaph :-" He advocated civil liberty, general benevolence, ascendancy of justice, and the improvement of the human race."

As a pushing publisher Phillips soon distinguished himself, for the Liberals came to him, and he had quite enough sense to discover if a book was good. The old monastic ground of the Black Friars He produced many capital volumes of "Ana," on the seems to have been beloved by painters, for, as we French system, and memoirs of Foote, Monk Lewes, have seen, Vandyke lived luxuriously here, and was Wilkes, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He pub- frequently visited by Charles I. and his Court. lished Holcroft's "Travels," Godwin's best novels, Cornelius Jansen, the great portrait-painter of and Miss Owenson's (Lady Morgan's) first work, James's Court, arranged his black draperies and "The Novice of St. Dominick." In 1807, when he ground his fine carnations in the same locality; removed to New Bridge Street, he served the office and at the same time Isaac Oliver, the exquisite of sheriff; was knighted on presenting an address, Court miniature-painter, dwelt in the same place. and effected many reforms in the prisons and lock-It was to him Lady Ayres, to the rage of her up houses. In his useful "Letter to the Livery of London" he computes the number of writs then annually issued at 24,000; the sheriffs' expenses at £2,000. He also did his best to repress the cruelties of the mob to poor wretches in the pillory. He was a steady friend of Alderman Waithman, and was with him in the carriage at the funeral of Queen Caroline, in 1821, when a bullet from a soldier's carbine passed through the carriage window near Hyde Park. In 1809 Phillips had some reverses, and breaking up his publishing-office in Bridge Street, devoted himself to the profitable reform of school-books, publishing them under the names of Goldsmith, Mavor, and Blair.

This active-minded man was the first to assert that Dr. Wilmot wrote "Junius," and to start the celebrated scandal about George III. and the young Quakeress, Hannah Lightfoot, daughter of a linendraper, at the corner of Market Street, St. James's. She afterwards, it is said, married a grocer, named Axford, on Ludgate Hill, was then carried off by the prince, and bore him three sons, who in time became generals. The story is perhaps traceable to Dr. Wilmot, whose daughter married the Duke of Cumberland. Phillips found time to attack the Newtonian theory of gravitation, to advocate a memorial to Shakespeare, to compile a ook containing a million of facts, to write on

jealous husband, came for a portrait of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, an imprudence that very nearly led to the assassination of the poet-lord, who believed himself so specially favoured of Heaven.

The king's printing-office for proclamations, &c., used to be in Printing-house Square, but was removed in 1770; and we must not forget that where a Norman fortress once rose to oppress the weak, to guard the spoils of robbers, and to protect the oppressor, the Times printing-office now stands, to diffuse its ceaseless floods of knowledge, to spread its resistless ægis over the poor and the oppressed, and ever using its vast power to extend liberty and crush injustice, whatever shape the Proteus assumes, whether it sits upon a throne or lurks in a swindler's office.

This great paper was started in the year 1785, by Mr. John Walter, under the name of the Daily Universal Register. It was first called the Times, January 1, 1788, when the following prospectus appeared :

"The Universal Register has been a name as injurious to the logographic newspaper as Tristram was to Mr. Shandy's son; but old Shandy forgot he might have rectified by confirmation the mistake of the parson at baptism, and with the touch of a bishop changed Tristram into Trismegistus. The Universal Register, from the day of its first