still to be doubled in circumference, for Mother Shipton says that the day will come when Highgate Hill shall be in the middle of the town. Few indeed are the Londoners who see more than a small circuit around their homes, the main arteries of mercantile life, and some of the principal sights. It is very easy to live with eyes open, but it is more usual, and a great deal more fashionable, to live with eyes shut. Scarcely any man in what is usually called "society has the slightest idea of what there is to be seen in his own great metropolis, because he never looks, or still more perhaps, because he never inquires, and the architectural and historical treasures of the City are almost as unknown to the West End as the buried cities of Bashan or the lost tombs of Etruria. Strangers also, especially foreigners, who come perhaps with the very object of seeing London, are inclined to judge it by its general aspects, and do not stay long enough to find out its more hidden resources. They never find out that the London of Brook Street and Grosvenor Street, still more the odious London of Tyburnia, Belgravia, and South Kensington, is as different to the London of our great-grandfathers as modernised Paris is to the oldest town in Brittany, and dwellers in the West End do not know that they might experience almost the refreshment and tonic of going abroad in the transition from straight streets and featureless houses to the crooked thoroughfares half-an-hour off, where every street has a reminiscence, and every turn is a picture. There is a passage in Heinrich Heine which says, "You may send a philosopher to London, but by no means a poet. The bare earnestness of everything, the colossal sameness, the machine-like movement, oppresses the imagination and rends the heart in twain." But those who know London well will think that Heine must have stayed at an hotel in Wimpole Street, and that his researches can never have taken him much beyond Oxford Street and its surroundings; and that a poet might find plenty of inspiration, if he would do what is so easy, and break the ice of custom, and see London as it really is—in its strange varieties of society, in its lights and shadows of working life, in its endless old buildings which must ever have a hold on the inmost sympathies of those who look upon them, and who, while learning the story they tell of many generations, seem to realise that they are "in the presence of their fame and feel their influence." An artist, after a time, will find London more interesting than any other place, for nowhere are there such atmospheric effects on fine days, and nowhere is the enormous power of blue more felt in the picture; while the soot, which puts all the stones into mourning, makes everything look old. The detractors of the charms of London always lay their strongest emphasis upon its fogs "More like a distillation of mud than anything else; the ghost of mud,—the spiritualised medium of departed mud, through which the dead citizens of London probably tread, in the Hades whither they are translated."-Hawthorne. Note-books. But if the fogs are not too thick an artist will find an additional charm in them, and will remember with pleasure the beautiful effects upon the river, when only the grand features remain, and the ignominious details are blotted out; or when "the eternal mist around St. Paul's is turned to a glittering haze." In fact, if the capitals of Europe are considered, London is one of the most picturesque-far more so than Paris or Vienna; incomparably more so than St. Petersburg, Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Brussels, or Madrid. No town in Europe is better supplied with greenery than London even in the City almost every street has its tree. And pity often is ill bestowed upon Londoners by dwellers in the country, for the fact is all the best attributes of the country are to be found in the town. The squares of the West End, with their high railings, and ill-kept gardens, are certainly ugly enough, but the parks are full of beauty, and there are walks in Kensington Gardens which in early spring present a maze of loveliness. Lately too, since window gardening has become the fashion, each house has its boxes of radiant flowers, enlivening the dusty stonework or smoke-blackened bricks, and seeming all the more cheerful from their contrast. Through the markets too all that is best in country produce flows into the town: the strawberries, the cherries, the vegetables, are always finer there than at the places where they are grown. Milton, who changed his house oftener than anyone else, and knew more parts of the metropolis intimately, thus apostrophizes it "Oh city, founded by Dardanian hands, Whose towering front the circling realms commandā, In all the earth, but it abounds in thee." There is a certain class of minds, and a large one, which stagnates in the country, and which finds the most luxurious stimulant in the ceaseless variety of London, where there is always so much to be seen and so much to be heard, and these make so much to be thought of. "I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and as intense local attachments, as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles;-life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print-shops, the old book-stalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes-London itself a pantomime and a masquerade-all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. . . . I consider the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind; and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm, are all the inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city."-Charles Lamb to Wordsworth, Jan. 30, 1801. Many derivations are given for the name London. Some derive it from Lhwn-dinas, the "City in the Wood;" others from Llongdinas, the "City of Ships;" others from Llyndùn, the "Hill Fortress by the Lake." Geoffrey of Monmouth says that Brute "builded this citie" about A.C. 1008. From the time at which it is reported to have been founded by Brute, says Brayley, "even fable itself is silent in regard to its history, until the century immediately preceding the Roman invasion." Then King Lud is said to have encircled it with walls, and adorned it "with fayre buildings and towers." The remains found certainly prove the existence of a British city on the site before the Londinium, or Colonia Augusta, spoken of by Tacitus and Ammianus Marcellinus, which must have been founded by the Roman expedition under Aulus Plautius in A.D. 43Tacitus mentions that it was already the great "mart of trade and commerce" and the "chief residence of merchants," when the revolt of the Iceni occurred under Boadicea in A.D. 61, in which it was laid waste with fire and sword. It had however risen from its ashes in the time of Severus (A.D. 193-211), when Tacitus describes it as "illustrious for the vast number of merchants who resorted to it, for its extensive commerce, and for the abundance of every kind of commodity which it could supply."* Stow says that the walls of London were built by Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, "about the year of Christ 306," at any rate there is little doubt that they were erected in the fourth century. They were rather more than two miles in circumference, defended by towers, and marked at the principal points by the great gates, Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, and Ludgate. The best fragments of the old wall remaining are to be seen opposite Sion College, and in the churchyard of St. Giles, Cripplegate: there is also a fragment in St. Martin's Court on Ludgate Hill. Quantities of Roman antiquities, tessellated pavements, urns, vases, &c., have been found from time to time within this circuit, especially in digging the foundations of the Goldsmiths' Hall, and of the Hall of Commerce in Threadneedle Street. For a long time these remains were carelessly kept or not kept at all, but latterly some of them have been collected in the admirable little museum under the Guildhall. Several Roman cemeteries have been discovered, one of them by * Annal. Lib. xiv. c. 33. |