XVIII. BLACKFRIARS…

XVIII. BLACKFRIARS

Three Norman Fortresses on the Thames' Bank--The Black Parliament--The Trial of Katherine of Arragon--Shakespeare a Blackfriars Manager--The Blackfriars Puritans--The Jesuit Sermon at Hunsdon House--Fatal Accident--Extraordinary Escapes--Queen Elizabeth at Lord Herbert's Marriage--Old Blackfriars Bridge--Johnson and Mylne--Laying of the Stone--The Inscription--A Toll Riot--Failure of the Bridge--The New Bridge--Bridge Street--Sir Richard Phillips and his Works--Painters in Blackfriars--The King's Printing Office--Printing House Square--The Times and its History--Walter's Enterprise--War with the Dispatch--- The gigantic Swindling Scheme exposed by the Times--Apothecaries' Hall--Quarrel with the College of Physicians.

On the river-side, between St. Paul's and Whitefriars, there stood, in the Middle Ages, three Norman fortresses. Castle Baynard and the old tower of Mountfiquet were two of them. Baynard Castle, granted to the Earls of Clare and afterwards rebuilt by Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, was the palace in which the Duke of Buckingham offered the crown to his wily confederate, Richard the Crookback. In Queen Elizabeth's time it was granted to the Earls of Pembroke, who lived there in splendour till the Great Fire melted their gold, calcined their jewels, and drove them into the fashionable flood that was already moving westward. Mountfiquet Castle was pulled down in 1276, when Hubert de Berg, Earl of Kent, transplanted a colony of Black Dominican friars from Holborn, near Lincoln's Inn, to the river-side, south of Ludgate Hill. Yet so conservative is even Time in England, that a recent correspondent of Notes and Queries points out a piece of mediæval walling and the fragment of a buttress, still standing, at the foot of the Times Office, in Printing House Square, which seem to have formed part of the stronghold of the Mountfiquets. This interesting relic is on the left hand of Queen Victoria Street, going up from the bridge, just where there was formerly a picturesque but dangerous descent by a flight of break-neck stone steps. At the right-hand side of the same street stands an old rubble chalk wall, even older. It is just past the new house of the Bible Society, and seems to have formed part of the old City wall, which at first ended at Baynard Castle. The rampart advanced to Mountfiquet, and, lastly, to please and protect the Dominicans, was pushed forward outside Ludgate to the Fleet, which served as a moat, the Old Bailey being an advanced work.

King Edward I. and Queen Eleanor heaped many gifts on these sable friars. Charles V. of France was lodged at their monastery when he visited England, but his nobles resided in Henry's newly-built palace of Bridewell, a gallery being thrown over the Fleet and driven through the City wall, to serve as a communication between the two mansions. Henry held the "Black Parliament" in this monastery, and here Cardinal Campeggio presided at the trial which ended with the tyrant's divorce from the ill-used Katherine of Arragon. In the same house the Parliament also sat that condemned Wolsey, and sent him to beg "a little earth for charity" of the monks of Leicester. The rapacious king laid his rough hand on the treasures of the house in 1538, and Edward VI. sold the hall and prior's lodgings to Sir Francis Bryan, a courtier, afterwards granting Sir Francis Cawarden, Master of the Revels, the whole house and precincts of the Preacher Friars, the yearly value being then valued at nineteen pounds. The holy brothers were dispersed to beg or thieve, and the church was pulled down, but the mischievous right of sanctuary continued.

And now we come to the event which connects the old monastic ground with the name of the great genius of England. James Burbage (afterwards Shakespeare's friend and fellow actor), and other servants of the Earl of Leicester, tormented out of the City by the angry edicts of over-scrupulous Lord Mayors, took shelter in the Precinct, and there, in 1578, erected a playhouse (Playhouse Yard). Every attempt was in vain made to crush the intruders. About the year 1586, according to the best authorities, the young Shakespeare came to London and joined the company at the Blackfriars Theatre. Only three years later we find the new arrival--and this is one of the unsolvable mysteries of Shakespeare's life--one of sixteen sharers in the prosperous though persecuted theatre. It is true that Mr. Halliwell has lately discovered that he was not exactly a proprietor, but only an actor, receiving a share of the profits of the house, exclusive of the galleries (the boxes and dress circle of those days), but this is, after all, only a lessening of the difficulty; and it is almost as remarkable that a young, unknown Warwickshire poet should receive such profits as it is that he should have held a sixteenth of the whole property. Without the generous patronage of such patrons as the Earl of Southampton or Lord Brooke, how could the young actor have thriven? He was only twenty-six, and may have written "Venus and Adonis" or "Lucrece;" yet the first of these poems was not published till 1593. He may already, it is true, have adapted one or two tolerably successful historical plays, and, as Mr. Collier thinks, might have written The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, or The Two Gentlemen of Verona. One thing is certain, that in 1587 five companies of players, including the Blackfriars Company, performed at Stratford, and in his native town Mr. Collier thinks Shakespeare first proved himself useful to his new comrades.

In 1589 the Lord Mayor closed two theatres for ridiculing the Puritans. Burbage and his friends, alarmed at this, petitioned the Privy Council, and pleaded that they had never introduced into their plays matters of state or religion. The Blackfriars company, in 1593, began to build a summer theatre, the Globe, in Southwark; and Mr. Collier, remembering that this was the very year "Venus and Adonis" was published, attributes some great gift of the Earl of Southampton to Shakespeare to have immediately followed this poem, which was dedicated to him. By 1594 the poet had written King Richard II. and King Richard III., and Burbage's son Richard had made himself famous as the first representative of the crook-backed king. In 1596 we find Shakespeare and his partners (only eight now) petitioning the Privy Council to allow them to repair and enlarge their theatre, which the Puritans of Blackfriars wanted to close. The Council allowed the repairs, but forbade the enlargement. At this time Shakespeare was living near the Bear Garden, Southwark, to be close to the Globe. He was now evidently a thriving, "warm" man, for in 1597 he purchased for £60 New Place, one of the best houses in Stratford. In 1613 we find Shakespeare purchasing a plot of ground not far from Blackfriars Theatre, and abutting on a street leading down to Puddle Wharf, "right against the king's majesty's wardrobe;" but he had retired to Stratford, and given up London and the stage before this. The deed of this sale was sold in 1841 for £162 5s.

In 1608 the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London made a final attempt to crush the Blackfriars players, but failing to prove to the Lord Chancellor that the City had ever exercised any authority within the precinct and liberty of Blackfriars, their cause fell to the ground. The Corporation then opened a negotiation for purchase with Burbage, Shakespeare, and the other (now nine) shareholders. The players asked about £7,000, Shakespeare's four shares being valued at £1,433 6s. 8d., including the wardrobe and properties, estimated at £500. The poet's income at this time Mr. Collier estimates at £400 a year. The Blackfriars Theatre was pulled down in Cromwell's time (1655), and houses built in its room.

Randolph, the dramatist, a pupil of Ben Jonson's, ridicules, in The Muses' Looking-Glass, that strange "morality" play of his, the Puritan feather-sellers of Blackfriars, whom Ben Jonson also taunts; Randolph's pretty Puritan, Mrs. Flowerdew, says of the ungodly of Blackfriars:--

"Indeed, it sometimes pricks my conscience, I come to sell 'em pins and looking-glasses."

To which her friend, Mr. Bird, replies, with the sly sanctity of Tartuffe:--

"I have this custom, too, for my feathers; 'Tis fit that we, which are sincere professors, Should gain by infidels."

Ben Jonson, that smiter of all such hypocrites, wrote Volpone at his house in Blackfriars, where he laid the scene of The Alchymist. The Friars were fashionable, however, in spite of the players, for Vandyke lived in the precinct for nine years (he died in 1641); and the wicked Earl and Countess of Somerset resided in the same locality when they poisoned their former favourite, Sir Thomas Overbury. As late as 1735, Mr. Peter Cunningham says, there was an attempt to assert precinct privileges, but years before sheriffs had arrested in the Friars.

In 1623 Blackfriars was the scene of a most fatal and extraordinary accident. It occurred in the chief house of the Friary, then a district declining fast in respectability. Hunsdon House derived its name from Queen Elizabeth's favourite cousin, the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon, and was at the time occupied by Count de Tillier, the French ambassador. About three o'clock on Sunday, October 26th, a large Roman Catholic congregation of about three hundred persons, worshipping to a certain degree in stealth, not without fear from the Puritan feather-makers of the theatrical neighbourhood, had assembled in a long garret on the third and uppermost storey. Master Drury, a Jesuit prelate of celebrity, had drawn together this crowd of timid people. The garret, looking over the gateway, was approached by a passage having a door opening into the street, and also by a corridor from the ambassador's withdrawing-room. The garret was about seventeen feet wide and forty feet long, with a vestry for a priest partitioned off at one end. In the middle of the garret, and near the wall, stood a raised table and chair for the preacher. The gentry sat on chairs and stools facing the pulpit, the rest stood behind, crowding as far as the head of the stairs. At the appointed hour Master Drury, the priest, came from the inner room in white robe and scarlet stole, an attendant carrying a book and an hour-glass, by which to measure his sermon. He knelt down at the chair for about an Ave Maria, but uttered no audible prayer. He then took the Jesuits' Testament, and read for the text the Gospel for the day, which was, according to the Gregorian Calendar, the twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost--"Therefore is the kingdom of heaven like unto a man being a king that would make an account of his servants. And when he began to make account there was one presented unto him that owed him ten thousand talents." Having read the text, the Jesuit preacher sat down, and putting on his head a red quilt cap, with a white linen one beneath it, commenced his sermon. He had spoken for about half an hour when the calamity happened. The great weight of the crowd in the old room suddenly snapped the main summer beam of the floor, which instantly crashed in and fell into the room below. The main beams there also snapped and broke through to the ambassador's drawing-room over the gatehouse, a distance of twenty-two feet. Only a part, however, of the gallery floor, immediately over Father Rudgate's chamber, a small room used for secret mass, gave way. The rest of the floor, being less crowded, stood firm, and the people on it, having no other means of escape, drew their knives and cut a way through a plaster wall into a neighbouring room.

A contemporary pamphleteer, who visited the ruins and wrote fresh from the first outburst of sympathy, says: "What ear without tingling can bear the doleful and confused cries of such a troop of men, women, and children, all falling suddenly in the same pit, and apprehending with one horror the same ruin? What eye can behold without inundation of tears such a spectacle of men overwhelmed with breaches of mighty timber, buried in rubbish and smothered with dust? What heart without evaporating in sighs can ponder the burden of deepest sorrows and lamentations of parents, children, husbands, wives, kinsmen, friends, for their dearest pledges and chiefest comforts? This world all bereft and swept away with one blast of the same dismal tempest."

The news of the accident fast echoing through London, Serjeant Finch, the Recorder, and the Lord Mayor and aldermen at once provided for the safety of the ambassador's family, who were naturally shaking in their shoes, and shutting up the gates to keep off the curious and thievish crowd, set guards at all the Blackfriars passages. Workmen were employed to remove the débris and rescue the sufferers who were still alive. The pamphleteer, again rousing himself to the occasion, and turning on his tears, says:--"At the opening hereof what a chaos! what fearful objects! what lamentable representations! Here some buried, some dismembered, some only parts of men; here some wounded and weltering in their own and others' blood; others putting forth their fainting hands and crying out for help. Here some gasping and panting for breath; others stifled for want of air. So the most of them being thus covered with dust, their death was a kind of burial." All that night and part of the next day the workmen spent in removing the bodies, and the inquest was then held. It was found that the main beams were only ten inches square, and had two mortise-holes, where the girders were inserted, facing each other, so that only three inches of solid timber were left. The main beam of the lower room, about thirteen inches square, without mortise-holes, broke obliquely near the end. No wall gave way, and the roof and ceiling of the garret remained entire. Father Drury perished, as did also Father Rudgate, who was in his own apartment, underneath. Lady Webb, of Southwark, Lady Blackstone's daughter, from Scroope's Court, Mr. Fowell, a Warwickshire gentleman, and many tradesmen, servants, and artisans--ninety-five in all--perished. Some of the escapes seemed almost miraculous. Mistress Lucie Penruddock fell between Lady Webb and a servant, who were both killed, yet was saved by her chair falling over her head. Lady Webb's daughter was found alive near her dead mother, and a girl named Elizabeth Sanders was also saved by the dead who fell and covered her. A Protestant scholar, though one of the very undermost, escaped by the timbers arching over him and some of them slanting against the wall. He tore a way out through the laths of the ceiling by main strength, then crept between two joists to a hole where he saw light, and was drawn through a door by one of the ambassador's family. He at once returned to rescue others. There was a girl of ten who cried to him, "Oh, my mother!--oh, my sister!--they are down under the timber." He told her to be patient, and by God's grace they would be quickly got forth. The child replied, "This will be a great scandal to our religion." One of the men that fell said to a fellow-sufferer, "Oh, what advantage our adversaries will take at this!" The other replied, "If it be God's will this should befall us, what can we say to it?" One gentleman was saved by keeping near the stairs, while his friend, who had pushed near the pulpit, perished.

Many of those who were saved died in a few hours after their extrication. The bodies of Lady Webb, Mistress Udall, and Lady Blackstone's daughter, were carried to Ely House, Holborn, and there buried in the back courtyard. In the fore courtyard, by the French ambassador's house, a huge grave, eighteen feet long and twelve feet broad, was dug, and forty-four corpses piled within it. In another pit, twelve feet long and eight feet broad, in the ambassador's garden, they buried fifteen more. Others were interred in St. Andrew's, St. Bride's, and Blackfriars churches. The list of the killed and wounded is curious, from its topographical allusions. Amongst other entries, we find "John Halifax, a water-bearer" (in the old times of street conduits the water-bearer was an important person); "a son of Mr. Flood, the scrivener, in Holborn; a man of Sir Ives Pemberton; Thomas Brisket, his wife, son, and maid, in Montague Close; Richard Fitzgarret, of Gray's Inn, gentleman; Davie, an Irishman, in Angell Alley, Gray's Inn, gentleman; Sarah Watson, daughter of Master Watson, chirurgeon; Master Grimes, near the 'Horse Shoe' tavern, in Drury Lane; John Bevan, at the 'Seven Stars', in Drury Lane; Francis Man, Thieving Lane, Westminster," &c. As might have been expected, the fanatics of both parties had much to say about this terrible accident. The Catholics declared that the Protestants, knowing this to be a chief place of meeting for men of their faith, had secretly drawn out the pins, or sawn the supporting timbers partly asunder. The Protestants, on the other hand, lustily declared that the planks would not bear such a weight of Romish sin, and that God was displeased with their pulpits and altars, their doctrine and sacrifice. One zealot remembered that, at the return of Prince Charles from the madcap expedition to Spain, a Catholic had lamented, or was said to have lamented, the street bonfires, as there would be never a fagot left to burn the heretics. "If it had been a Protestant chapel," the Puritans cried, "the Jesuits would have called the calamity an omen of the speedy downfall of heresy." A Catholic writer replied "with a word of comfort," and pronounced the accident to be a presage of good fortune to Catholics and of the overthrow of error and heresy. This zealous, but not well-informed, writer compared Father Drury's death with that of Zuinglius, who fell in battle, and with that of Calvin, "who, being in despair, and calling upon the devil, gave up his wicked soul, swearing, cursing, and blaspheming." So intolerance, we see, is neither specially Protestant nor Catholic, but of every party. "The Fatal Vespers," as that terrible day at Blackfriars was afterwards called, were long remembered with a shudder by Catholic England.

In a curious old pamphlet entitled "Something Written by Occasion of that Fatall and Memorable Accident in the Blacke-friers, on Sonday, being the 26th October, 1623, stilo antiquo, and the 5th November, stilo novo, or Romano" the author relates a singular escape of one of the listeners. "When all things were ready," he says, "and the prayer finished, the Jesuite tooke for his text the gospell of the day, being (as I take it) the 22nd Sunday after Trinity, and extracted out of the 18th of Matthew, beginning at the 21st verse, to the end. The story concerns forgiveness of sinnes, and describeth the wicked cruelty of the unjust steward, whom his maister remitted, though he owed him 10,000 talents, but he would not forgive his fellow a 100 pence, whereupon he was called to a new reckoning, and cast into prison, and then the particular words are, which he insisted upon, the 34th verse: 'So his master was wroth, and delivered him to the jaylor, till he should pay all that was due to him.' For the generall, he urged many good doctrines and cases; for the particular, he modelled out that fantasie of purgatory, which he followed with a full crie of pennance, satisfaction, paying of money, and such like.

"While this exercise was in hand, a gentleman brought up his friend to see the place, and bee partaker of the sermon, who all the time he was going up stairs cried out, 'Whither doe I goe? I protest my heart trembles;' and when he came into the roome, the priest being very loud, he whispered his friend in the eare that he was afraid, for, as he supposed, the room did shake under him; at which his friend, between smiling and anger, left him, and went close to the wall behind the preacher's chaire. The gentleman durst not stirre from the staires, and came not full two yards in the roome, when on a sudden there was a kinde of murmuring amongst the people, and some were heard to say, 'The roome shakes;' which words being taken up one of another, the whole company rose up with a strong suddainnesse, and some of the women screeched. I cannot compare it better than to many passengers in a boat in a tempest, who are commanded to sit still and let the waterman alone with managing the oares, but some unruly people rising overthrowes them all. So was this company served; for the people thus affrighted started up with extraordinary quicknesse, and at an instant the maine summer beame broke in sunder, being mortised in the wall some five foot from the same; and so the whole roofe or floore fell at once, with all the people that stood thronging on it, and with the violent impetuosity drove downe the nether roome quite to the ground, so that they fell twenty-four foot high, and were most of them buried and bruised betweene the rubbish and the timber; and though some were questionlesse smothered, yet for the most part they were hurt and bled, and being taken forth the next day, and laid all along in the gallery, presented to the lookers-on a wofull spectacle of fourscore and seventeen dead persons, besides eight or nine which perished since, unable to recover themselves."

"They that kept themselves close to the walls, or remained by the windows, or held by the rafters, or settled themselves by the stayres, or were driven away by fear and suspition, sauved themselves without further hurt; but such as seemed more devoute, and thronged neere the preacher, perished in a moment with himselfe and other priests and Jesuites; and this was the summe of that unhappy disaster."

In earlier days Blackfriars had been a locality much inhabited by fashionable people, especially about the time of Queen Elizabeth. Pennant quotes from the Sydney Papers a curious account of a grand festivity at the house of Lord Herbert, which the Queen honoured by her attendance. The account is worth inserting, if only for the sake of a characteristic bit of temper which the Queen exhibited on the occasion.

"Lord Herbert, son of William, fourth Earl of Worcester," says Pennant, "had a house in Blackfriars, which Queen Elizabeth, in 1600, honoured with her presence, on occasion of his nuptials with the daughter and heiress of John, Lord Russell, son of Francis, Earl of Bedford. The queen was met at the waterside by the bride, and carried to her house in a lectica by six knights. Her majesty dined there, and supped in the same neighbourhood with Lord Cobham, where there was 'a memorable maske of eight ladies, and a strange dawnce new invented. Their attire is this: each hath a skirt of cloth of silver, a mantell of coruscian taffete, cast under the arme, and their haire loose about their shoulders, curiously knotted and interlaced. Mrs. Fitton leade. These eight ladys maskers choose eight ladies more to dawnce the measures. Mrs. Fitton went to the queen and woed her dawnce. Her majesty (the love of Essex rankling in her heart) asked what she was? "Affection," she said. "Affection!" said the queen; "affection is false"; yet her majestie rose up and dawnced. At this time the queen was sixty. Surely, as Mr. Walpole 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 Sunday, November 19, 1769. It was built from the design of Robert Mylne, a clever young Scotch engineer, whose family had been master masons to the kings of Scotland for five hundred years. Mylne had just returned from a professional tour in Italy, where he had followed in the footsteps of Vitruvius, and gained the first 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 protégé of Lord Bute's), and Dr. Johnson's friend, Gwynn, well known for his admirable work on London improvements. The committee were, however, just enough to be unanimous in favouring the young unknown Scotchman, and he carried off the prize. Directly it was known that Mylne's arches were to be 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 cast-iron 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 only boys; and, moreover, architecture had sunk so low at Rome, that even the Pantheon had been deformed by petty decorations. In his third letter the Doctor grew more scientific, and even more confused. He was very angry with Mr. Mylne's friends for asserting that though a semi-ellipse might be weaker than a semicircle, it had quite strength enough to support a bridge. "I again venture to declare," he wrote--"I again venture to declare, in defiance of all this contemptuous superiority" (how arrogant men hate other people's arrogance!), "that a straight line will bear no weight. Not even the science of Vasari will make that form strong which the laws of nature have condemned to weakness. By the position that a straight line will bear nothing is meant that it receives no 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 loaded will be itself part of the load. The semi-elliptical arch has one recommendation yet unexamined. We are told that it is difficult of execution."

In the face of this noisy newspaper thunder, Mylne went on, and produced one of the most beautiful bridges in England for £152,640 3s. 10d., actually £163 less than the original estimate--an admirable example for all architects, present and to come. The bridge, which had eight 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.

The foundation-stone of Blackfriars Bridge was laid by Sir Thomas Chitty, Lord Mayor, on the 31st of October, 1760. Horace Walpole, always Whiggish, describing the event, says:--"The Lord Mayor laid the first stone of the new bridge yesterday. There is an inscription on it in honour of Mr. Pitt, which has a very Roman air, though very unclassically expressed. They talk of the contagion of his public spirit; I believe they had not got rid of their panic about mad dogs." Several gold, silver, and copper coins of the reign of George II. (just dead) were placed under the stone, with a silver medal presented to Mr. Mylne by the Academy of St. Luke's, and upon two plates of tin--Bonnel Thornton said they should have been lead--was engraved a very shaky Latin inscription, thus rendered into English:--

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 it was opened for foot passengers, the completed portion being connected with the shore by a temporary 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' lives were lost, and one rioter, being struck with a bullet, ran howling for thirty or forty yards, and then dropped down dead. Nevertheless, the iniquitous 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's, and dined with him at this residence at least on one occasion. The house afterwards became the "York Hotel," and, according to Mr. Timbs, was taken down in 1863.

The Bridge repairs (between 1833 and 1840), by Walker and Burgess, engineers, at an expense of £74,000, produced a loss to the contractors; and the removal of the cornice and balustrade spoiled the bridge, from whence 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 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 storeys--the lower for carriages, the upper for pedestrians--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 keystone 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 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.

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.

Twelve designs had been sent in at the competition, and, singularly enough, among the competitors was a Mr. Mylne, grandson of Johnson's foe. The design of Mr. Page was first selected, as the handsomest and cheapest. It consisted of only three arches. Ultimately Mr. Joseph Cubitt won the 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.

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 fiddle-faddle 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, àpropos of nothing, a well-known evidence of desperate imbecility."

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 intimate friend, furnishes us with many curious facts, 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 a bookseller's shop, started a newspaper (the 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. His house being burned down, he removed to London, and projected a Sunday newspaper, but eventually Mr. Bell stole the idea and started the Messenger. In 1795 this restless and energetic man commenced the Monthly Magazine. Before this he had already been a hosier, a tutor, and a speculator in canals. The politico-literary magazine 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 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.

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. He produced many capital volumes of Ana, on the French system, and memoirs of Foote, Monk, Lewes, Wilkes, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He published Holcroft's "Travels," Godwin's best novels, and Miss Owenson's (Lady Morgan's) first work, "The Novice of St. Dominick." In 1807, when he removed to New Bridge Street, he served the office of sheriff; was knighted on presenting an address, and effected many reforms in the prisons and lock-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 book containing a million of facts, to write on 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," of Bloomfield's "Farmer's Boy," and O'Meara's "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."

The old monastic ground of the Black Friars seems to have been beloved by painters, for, as we have seen, Vandyke lived luxuriously here, and was frequently visited by Charles I. and his Court. Cornelius Jansen, the great portrait-painter of James's Court, arranged his black draperies and ground his fine carnations in the same locality; and at the same time Isaac Oliver, the exquisite Court miniature-painter, dwelt in the same place. It was to him Lady Ayres, to the rage of her 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 to use 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 appearance to the day of its confirmation, had, like Tristram, suffered from innumerable casualties, both laughable and serious, arising from its name, which in its introduction was immediately curtailed of its fair proportions by all who called for it, the word 'Universal' being universally omitted, and the word 'Register' only retained. 'Boy, bring me the Register.' The waiter answers, 'Sir, we have no library; but you may see it in the "New Exchange" coffee-house.' 'Then I will see it there,' answers the disappointed politician; and he goes to the 'New Exchange' coffee-house, and calls for the Register, upon which the waiter tells him he cannot have it, as he is not a subscriber, or presents him with the Court and City Register, the Old Annual Register, or the New Annual Register, or, if the house be within the purlieus of Covent Garden or the hundreds of Drury, slips into the politician's hand Harris's Register of Ladies.

"For these and other reasons the printer of the Universal Register has added to its original name that of the Times, which, being a monosyllable, bids defiance to the corruptions and mutilations of the language.

"The Times! what a monstrous name! Granted--for the Times is a many-headed monster, that speaks with a hundred tongues, and displays a thousand characters; and in the course of its transitions in life, assumes innumerable shapes and humours.

"The critical reader will observe, we personify our new name; but as we give it no distinction of sex, and though it will be active in its vocation, yet we apply to it the neuter gender.

"The Times, being formed of and possessing qualities of opposite and heterogeneous natures, cannot be classed either in the animal or vegetable genus, but, like the polypus, is doubtful; and in the discussion, description, and illustration, will employ the pens of the most celebrated literati.

"The heads of the Times, as has already been said, are many; these will, however, not always appear at the same time, but casually, as public or private affairs may call them forth.

"The principal or leading heads are--the literary, political, commercial, philosophical, critical, theatrical, fashionable, humorous, witty, &c., each of which is supplied with a competent share of intellect for the pursuit of their several functions, an endowment which is not in all cases to be found, even in the heads of the State, the heads of the Church, the heads of the law, the heads of the navy, the heads of the army, and, though last not least, the great heads of the universities.

"The political head of the Times--like that of Janus, the Roman deity--is double-faced. With one countenance it will smile continually on the friends of Old England, and with the other will frown incessantly on her enemies.

"The alteration we have made in our paper is not without precedents. The World has parted with half its caput mortuum and a moiety of its brains; the Herald has cutoff one half of its head and has lost its original humour; the Post, it is true, retains its whole head and its old features; and as to the other public prints, they appear as having neither heads nor tails.

"On the Parliamentary head, every communication that ability and industry can produce may be expected. To this great national object the Times will be most sedulously attentive, most accurately correct, and strictly impartial in its reports."

Both the Times and its predecessor were printed "logographically," Mr. Walter having obtained a patent for his peculiar system. The plan consisted in abridging the compositors' labour by casting all the more frequently recurring words in metal. It was, in fact, a system of partial stereotyping. The English language, said the sanguine inventor, contained above 90,000 words. This number Walter had reduced to about 5,000. The projector was assailed by the wits, who declared that his orders to the typefounders ran,--"Send me a hundredweight, in separate pounds, of heat, cold, wet, dry, murder, fire, dreadful robbery, atrocious outrage, fearful calamity, and alarming explosion." But nothing could daunt or stop Walter. One eccentricity of the Daily Register was that on red-letter days the title was printed in red ink, and the character of the day stated under the date-line. For instance, on Friday, August 11, 1786, there is a red heading, and underneath the words--

"Princess of Brunswick born. Holiday at the Bank, Excise offices, and the Exchequer."

The first number of the Times is not so large as the Morning Herald or Morning Chronicle of the same date, but larger than the London Chronicle, and of the same size as the Public Advertiser. (Knight Hunt.)

The first Walter lived in rough times, and suffered from the political storms that then prevailed. He was several times imprisoned for articles against great people, and it has been asserted that he stood in the pillory in 1790 for a libel against the Duke of York. This is not, however, true; but it is a fact that he was sentenced to such a punishment, and remained sixteen months in Newgate, till released at the intercession of the Prince of Wales. The first Walter died in 1812. The second Mr. Walter, who came to the helm in 1803, was the real founder of the future greatness of the Times; and he, too, had his rubs. In 1804 he offended the Government by denouncing the foolish Catamaran expedition. For this the Government meanly deprived his family of the printing for the Customs, and also withdrew their advertisements. During the war of 1805 the Government stopped all the foreign papers sent to the Times. Walter, stopped by no obstacle, at once contrived other means to secure early news, and had the triumph of announcing the capitulation of Flushing forty-eight hours before the intelligence had arrived through any other channel.

There were no reviews of books in the Times till long after it was started, but it paid great attention to the drama from its commencement. There were no leading articles for several years, yet in the very first year the Times displays threefold as many advertisements as its contemporaries. For many years Mr. Walter, with his usual sagacity and energy, endeavoured to mature some plan for printing the Times by steam. As early as 1804 a compositor named Martyn had invented a machine for the purpose of superseding the hand-press, which took hours struggling over the three or four thousand copies of the Times. The pressmen threatened destruction to the new machine, and it had to be smuggled piecemeal into the premises, while Martyn sheltered himself under various disguises to escape the vengeance of the workmen. On the eve of success, however, Walter's father lost courage, stopped the supplies, and the project was for the time abandoned. In 1814 Walter, however, returned to the charge. Koenig and Barnes put their machinery in premises adjoining the Times office, to avoid the violence of the pressmen. At one time the two inventors are said to have abandoned their machinery in despair, but a clerical friend of Walter examined the difficulty and removed it. The night came at last when the great experiment was to be made. The unconscious pressmen were kept waiting in the next office for news from the Continent. At six o'clock in the morning Mr. Walter entered the press-room, with a wet paper in his hand, and astonished the men by telling them that the Times had just been printed by steam. If they attempted violence, he said, there was a force ready to suppress it; but if they were peaceable their wages should be continued until employment was found for them. He could now print 1,100 sheets an hour. By-and-by Koenig's machine proved too complicated, and Messrs. Applegarth and Cowper invented a cylindrical one, that printed 8,000 an hour. Then came Hoe's process, which is now said to print at the rate of from 18,000 to 22,000 copies an hour (Grant). The various improvements in steam-printing have altogether cost the Times, according to general report, not less than £80,000.

About 1813 Dr. Stoddart, the brother-in-law of Hazlitt (afterwards Sir John Stoddart, a judge in Malta), edited the Times with ability, till his almost insane hatred of Bonaparte, "the Corsican fiend," as he called him, led to his secession in 1815 or 1816. Stoddart was the "Doctor Slop" whom Tom Moore derided in his gay little Whig lampoons. The next editor was Thomas Barnes, a better scholar and a far abler man. He had been a contemporary of Lamb at Christ's Hospital, and a rival of Blomfield, afterwards Bishop of London. While a student in the Temple he wrote the Times a series of political letters in the manner of "Junius," and was at once placed as a reporter in the gallery of the House. Under his editorship Walter secured some of his ablest contributors, including that Captain Stirling, "The Thunderer," whom Carlyle has sketched so happily. Stirling was an Irishman, who had fought with the Royal troops at Vinegar Hill, then joined the line, and afterwards turned gentleman farmer in the Isle of Bute. He began writing for the Times about 1815, and, it is said, eventually received £2,000 a year as a writer of dashing and effective leaders. Lord Brougham also, it is said, wrote occasional articles. Tom Moore was even offered £100 a month if he would contribute, and Southey declined an offer of £2,000 a year for editing the Times. Macaulay in his day wrote many brilliant squibs in the Times; amongst them one containing the line:

"Ye diners out, from whom we guard our spoons,"

and another on the subject of Wat Banks's candidateship for Cambridge. Barnes died in 1841. Horace Twiss, the biographer of Lord Eldon and nephew of Mrs. Siddons, also helped the Times forward by his admirable Parliamentary summaries, the first the Times had attempted. This able man died suddenly in 1848, while speaking at a meeting of the Rock Assurance Society at Radley's Hotel, Bridge Street.

One of the longest wars the Times ever carried on was that against Alderman Harmer. It was Harmer's turn, in due order of rotation, to become Lord Mayor. A strong feeling had arisen against Harmer because, as the avowed proprietor of the Weekly Dispatch, he inserted certain letters of the late Mr. Williams ("Publicola"), which were said to have had the effect of preventing Mr. Walter's return for Southwark (see page 59). The Times upon this wrote twelve powerful leaders against Harmer, which at once decided the question. This was a great assertion of power, and raised the Times in the estimation of all England. For these twelve articles, originally intended for letters, the writer (says Mr. Grant) received £200. But in 1841 the extraordinary social influence of this giant paper was even still more shown. Mr. O'Reilly, their Paris correspondent, obtained a clue to a vast scheme of fraud concocting in Paris by a gang of fourteen accomplished swindlers, who had already netted £10,700 of the million for which they had planned. At the risk of assassination, O'Reilly exposed the scheme in the Times, dating the exposé Brussels, in order to throw the swindlers on the wrong scent.

At a public meeting of merchants, bankers, and others held in the Egyptian Hall, Mansion House, October 1, 1841, the Lord Mayor (Thomas Johnson) in the chair, it was unanimously resolved to thank the proprietors of the Times for the services they had rendered in having exposed the most remarkable and extensively fraudulent conspiracy (the famous "Bogle" swindle) ever brought to light in the mercantile world, and to record in some substantial manner the sense of obligation conferred by the proprietors of the Times on the commercial world.

The proprietors of the Times declining to receive the £2,625 subscribed by the London merchants to recompense them for doing their duty, it was resolved, in 1842, to set apart the funds for the endowment of two scholarships, one at Christ's Hospital, and one at the City of London School. In both schools a commemorative tablet was put up, as well as one at the Royal Exchange and the Times printing-office.

At various periods the Times has had to endure violent attacks in the House of Commons, and many strenuous efforts to restrain its vast powers. In 1819 John Payne Collier, one of their Parliamentary reporters, and better known as one of the greatest of Shakesperian critics, was committed into the custody of the Serjeant-at-Arms for a report in which he had attacked Canning. The Times, however, had some powerful friends in the House; and in 1821 we find Mr. Hume complaining that the Government advertisements were systematically withheld from the Times. In 1831 Sir R.H. Inglis complained that the Times had been guilty of a breach of privilege, in asserting that there were borough nominees and lackeys in the House. Sir Charles Wetherell, that titled, incomparable old Tory, joined in the attack, which Burdett chivalrously cantered forward to repel. Sir Henry Hardinge wanted the paper prosecuted, but Lord John Russell, Orator Hunt, and O'Connell, however, moved the previous question, and the great debate on the Reform Bill then proceeded. The same year the House of Lords flew at the great paper. The Earl of Limerick had been called "an absentee, and a thing with human pretensions." The Marquis of Londonderry joined in the attack. The next day Mr. Lawson, printer of the Times, was examined and worried by the House; and Lord Wynford moved that Mr. Lawson, as printer of a scandalous libel, should be fined £100, and committed to Newgate till the fine be paid. The next day Mr. Lawson handed in an apology, but Lord Brougham generously rose and denied the power of the House to imprison and fine without a trial by jury. The Tory lords spoke angrily; the Earl of Limerick called the press a tyrant that ruled all things, and crushed everything under its feet; and the Marquis of Londonderry complained of the coarse and virulent libels against Queen Adelaide, for her supposed opposition to Reform.

In 1833 O'Connell attributed dishonest motives to the London reporter who had suppressed his speeches, and the reporters in the Times expressed their resolution not to report any more of his speeches unless he retracted. O'Connell then moved in the House that the printer of the Times be summoned to the bar for printing their resolution, but his motion was rejected. In 1838 Mr. Lawson was fined £200 for accusing Sir John Conroy, treasurer of the household of the Duchess of Kent, of peculation. In 1840 an angry member brought a breach of privilege motion against the Times, and advised every one who was attacked in that paper to horsewhip the editor.

In January, 1829, the Times came out with a double sheet, consisting of eight pages, or forty-eight columns. In 1830 it paid £70,000 advertisement duty. In 1800 its sale had been below that of the Morning Chronicle, Post, Herald, and Advertiser.

The Times, according to Mr. Grant, in one day of 1870, received no less than £1,500 for advertisements. On June 22, 1862, it produced a paper containing no less than twenty-four pages, or 144 columns. In 1854 the Times had a circulation of 51,000 copies; in 1860, 60,000. For special numbers its sale is enormous. The biography of Prince Albert sold 90,000 copies; the marriage of the Prince of Wales, 110,000 copies. The income of the Times from advertisements alone has been calculated at £260,000. A writer in a Philadelphia paper of 1867 estimates the paper consumed weekly by the Times at seventy tons; the ink at two tons. There are employed in the office ten stereotypers, sixteen firemen and engineers, ninety machine-men, six men who prepare the paper for printing, and seven to transfer the papers to the news-agents. The new Walter press prints 22,000 to 24,000 impressions an hour, or 12,000 perfect sheets printed on both sides. It prints from a roll of paper three-quarters of a mile long, and cuts the sheets and piles them without help. It is a self-feeder, and requires only a man and two boys to guide its operations. A copy of the Times has been known to contain 4,000 advertisements; and for every daily copy it is computed that the compositors mass together not less than 2,500,000 separate types.

The number of persons engaged in daily working for the Times is put at nearly 350.

In the annals of this paper we must not forget the energy that, in 1834, established a system of home expresses, that enabled them to give the earliest intelligence before any other paper; and at an expense of £200 brought a report of Lord Durham's speech at Glasgow to London at the then unprecedented rate of fifteen miles an hour; nor should we forget their noble disinterestedness during the railway mania of 1845, when, although they were receiving more than £3,000 a week for railway advertisements, they warned the country unceasingly of the misery and ruin that must inevitably follow. The Times proprietors are known to pay the highest sums for articles, and to be uniformly generous in pensioning men who have spent their lives in its service.

The late Mr. Walter, even when M.P. for Berkshire and Nottingham, never forgot Printing-house Square when the debate, however late, had closed. One afternoon, says Mr. Grant, he came to the office and found the compositors gone to dinner. Just at that moment a parcel, marked "immediate and important," arrived. It was news of vast importance. He at once slipped off his coat, and set up the news with his own hands; a pressman was at his post, and by the time the men returned a second edition was actually printed and published. But his foresight and energy was most conspicuously shown in 1845, when the jealousy of the French Government had thrown obstacles in the way of the Times' couriers, who brought their Indian despatches from Marseilles. What were seas and deserts to Walter? He at once took counsel with Lieutenant Waghorn, who had opened up the overland route to India, and proposed to try a new route by Trieste. The result was that Waghorn reached London two days before the regular mail--the usual mail aided by the French Government. The Morning Herald was at first forty-eight hours before the Times, but after that the Times got a fortnight ahead; and although the Trieste route was abandoned, the Times, eventually, was left alone as a troublesome and invincible adversary.

Apothecaries' Hall, the grave stone and brick building, in Water Lane, Blackfriars, was erected in 1670 (Charles II.), as the dispensary and hall of the Company of Apothecaries, incorporated by a charter of James I., at the suit of Gideon Delaune, the king's own apothecary. Drugs in the Middle Ages were sold by grocers and pepperers, or by the doctors themselves, who, early in James's reign, formed one company with the apothecaries; but the ill-assorted union lasted only eleven years, for the apothecaries were then fast becoming doctors themselves.

Garth, in his "Dispensary," describes, in the Hogarthian manner, the topographical position of Apothecaries' Hall:--

"Nigh where Fleet Ditch descends in sable streams, To wash the sooty Naiads in the Thames, There stands a structure on a rising hill, Where tyros take their freedom out to kill."

Gradually the apothecaries, refusing to be merely "the doctors' tools," began to encroach more and more on the doctors' province, and to prescribe for and even cure the poor. In 1687 (James II.) open war broke out. First Dryden, then Pope, fought on the side of the doctors against the humbler men, whom they were taught to consider as mere greedy mechanics and empirics. Dryden first let fly his mighty shaft:--

"The apothecary tribe is wholly blind; From files a random recipe they take, And many deaths from one prescription make. Garth, generous as his muse, prescribes and gives; The shopman sells, and by destruction lives."

Pope followed with a smaller but keener arrow:--

"So modern 'pothecaries, taught the art By doctors' bills to play the doctor's part, Bold in the practice of mistaken rules, Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools."

The origin of the memorable affray between the College of Physicians and the Company of Apothecaries is admirably told by Mr. Jeaffreson, in his "Book of Doctors." The younger physicians, impatient at beholding the increasing prosperity and influence of the apothecaries, and the older ones indignant at seeing a class of men they had despised creeping into their quarters, and craftily laying hold of a portion of their monopoly, concocted a scheme to reinstate themselves in public favour. Without a doubt, many of the physicians who countenanced this scheme gave it their support from purely charitable motives; but it cannot be questioned that, as a body, the dispensarians were only actuated in their humanitarian exertions by a desire to lower the apothecaries and raise themselves in the eyes of the world. In 1687 the physicians, at a college meeting, voted "that all members of the college, whether fellows, candidates, or licentiates, should give their advice gratis to all their sick neighbouring poor, when desired, within the city of London, or seven miles round." The poor folk carried their prescriptions to the apothecaries, to learn that the trade charge for dispensing them was beyond their means. The physicians asserted that the demands of the drug-vendors were extortionate, and were not reduced to meet the finances of the applicants, to the end that the undertakings of benevolence might prove abortive. This was, of course, absurd. The apothecaries knew their own interests better than to oppose a system which at least rendered drug-consuming fashionable with the lower orders. Perhaps they regarded the poor as their peculiar property as a field of practice, and felt insulted at having the same humble people for whom they had pompously prescribed, and put up boluses at twopence apiece, now entering their shops with papers dictating what the twopenny bolus was to be composed of. But the charge preferred against them was groundless. Indeed, a numerous body of the apothecaries expressly offered to sell medicines "to the poor within their respective parishes at such rates as the committee of physicians should think reasonable."

But this would not suit the game of the physicians. "A proposal was started by a committee of the college that the college should furnish the medicines of the poor, and perfect alone that charity which the apothecaries refused to concur in; and, after divers methods ineffectually tried, and much time wasted in endeavouring to bring the apothecaries to terms of reason in relation to the poor, an instrument was subscribed by divers charitably-disposed members of the college, now in numbers about fifty, wherein they obliged themselves to pay ten pounds apiece towards the preparing and delivering medicines at their intrinsic value."

Such was the version of the affair given by the college apologists. The plan was acted upon, and a dispensary was eventually established (some nine years after the vote of 1687) at the College of Physicians, Warwick Lane, where medicines were vended to the poor at cost price. This measure of the college was impolitic and unjustifiable. It was unjust to that important division of the trade who were ready to vend the medicines at rates to be paid by the college authorities, for it took altogether out of their hands the small amount of profit which they, as dealers, could have realised on those terms. It was also an eminently unwise course. The College sank to the level of the Apothecaries' Hall, becoming an emporium for the sale of medicines. It was all very well to say that no profit was made on such sale, the censorious world would not believe it. The apothecaries and their friends denied that such was the fact, and vowed that the benevolent dispensarians were bent only on underselling and ruining them.

Again, the movement introduced dissensions within the walls of the college. Many of the first physicians, with the conservatism of success, did not care to offend the apothecaries, who were continually calling them in and paying them fees. They therefore joined in the cry against the dispensary. The profession was split up into two parties--Dispensarians and Anti-Dispensarians. The apothecaries combined, and agreed not to recommend the Dispensarians. The Anti-Dispensarians repaid this ill service by refusing to meet Dispensarians in consultation. Sir Thomas Millington, the President of the College, Hans Sloane, John Woodward, Sir Edmund King, and Sir Samuel Garth, were amongst the latter. Of these the last named was the man who rendered the most efficient service to his party. For a time Garth's great poem, "The Dispensary," covered the apothecaries and Anti-Dispensarians with ridicule. It rapidly passed through numerous editions. To say that of all the books, pamphlets, and broadsheets thrown out by the combatants on both sides, it is by far the one of the greatest merit, would be scant justice, when it might almost be said that it is the only one of them that can now be read by a gentleman without a sense of annoyance and disgust. There is no point of view from which the medical profession appears in a more humiliating and contemptible light than that which the literature of this memorable squabble presents to the student. Charges of ignorance, dishonesty, and extortion were preferred on both sides. And the Dispensarian physicians did not hesitate to taunt their brethren of the opposite camp with playing corruptly into the hands of the apothecaries--prescribing enormous and unnecessary quantities of medicine, so that the drug-vendors might make heavy bills, and, as a consequence, recommend in all directions such complacent superiors to be called in. Garth's, unfair and violent though it is, nowhere offends against decency. As a work of art it cannot be ranked high, and is now deservedly forgotten, although it has many good lines and some felicitous satire. Garth lived to see the apothecaries gradually emancipate themselves from the ignominious regulations to which they consented when their vocation was first separated from the grocery trade. Four years after his death they obtained legal acknowledgment of their right to dispense and sell medicines without the prescription of a physician; and six years later the law again decided in their favour with regard to the physicians' right of examining and condemning their drugs. In 1721, Mr. Rose, an apothecary, on being prosecuted by the college for prescribing as well as compounding medicines, carried the matter into the House of Lords, and obtained a favourable decision; and from 1727, in which year Mr. Goodwin, an apothecary, obtained in a court of law a considerable sum for an illegal seizure of his wares (by Drs. Arbuthnot, Bale, and Levit), the physicians may be said to have discontinued to exercise their privileges of inspection.

In his elaborate poem Garth cruelly caricatures the apothecaries of his day:--

"Long has he been of that amphibious fry, Bold to prescribe, and busy to apply; His shop the gazing vulgar's eyes employs, With foreign trinkets and domestic toys. Here mummies lay, most reverently stale, And there the tortoise hung her coat of mail; Not far from some huge shark's devouring head The flying-fish their finny pinions spread. Aloft in rows large poppy-heads were strung, And near, a scaly alligator hung. In this place drugs in musty heaps decay'd, In that dried bladders and false teeth were laid.

"An inner room receives the num'rous shoals Of such as pay to be reputed fools; Globes stand by globes, volumes on volumes lie, And planetary schemes amuse the eye. The sage in velvet chair here lolls at ease, To promise future health for present fees; Then, as from tripod, solemn shams reveals, And what the stars know nothing of foretells. Our manufactures now they merely sell, And their true value treacherously tell; Nay, they discover, too, their spite is such, That health, than crowns more valued, cost not much; Whilst we must steer our conduct by these rules, To cheat as tradesmen, or to starve as fools."

Before finally leaving Blackfriars, let us gather up a few reminiscences of the King's and Queen's printers who here first worked their inky presses.

Queen Anne, by patent in 1713, constituted Benjamin Tooke, of Fleet Street, and John Barber (afterwards Alderman Barber), Queen's printers for thirty years. This Barber, a high Tory and suspected Jacobite, was Swift's printer and warm friend. A remarkable story is told of Barber's dexterity in his profession. Being threatened with a prosecution by the House of Lords, for an offensive paragraph in a pamphlet which he had printed, and being warned of his danger by Lord Bolingbroke, he called in all the copies from the publishers, cancelled the leaf which contained the obnoxious passage, and returned them to the booksellers with a new paragraph supplied by Lord Bolingbroke; so that when the pamphlet was produced before the House, and the passage referred to, it was found unexceptionable. He added greatly to his wealth by the South Sea Scheme, which he had prudence enough to secure in time, and purchased an estate at East Sheen with part of his gain. In principles he was a Jacobite; and in his travels to Italy, whither he went for the recovery of his health, he was introduced to the Pretender, which exposed him to some danger on his return to England; for, immediately on his arrival, he was taken into custody by a King's messenger, but was released without punishment. After his success in the South Sea Scheme, he was elected Alderman of Castle Baynard Ward, 1722; sheriff, 1730; and, in 1732-3, Lord Mayor of London.

John Baskett subsequently purchased both shares of the patent, but his printing-offices in Blackfriars (now Printing House Square) were soon afterwards destroyed by fire. In 1739 George II. granted a fresh patent to Baskett for sixty years, with the privilege of supplying Parliament with stationery. Half this lease Baskett sold to Charles Eyre, who eventually appointed William Strahan his printer. Strahan soon after brought in Mr. Eyre, and in 1770 erected extensive premises in Printer Street, New Street Square, between Gough Square and Fetter Lane, near the present offices of Mr. Spottiswoode, one of whose family married Mr. Strahan's daughter. Strahan died a year after his old friend, Dr. Johnson, at his house in New Street, leaving £1,000 to the Stationers' Company, which his son Andrew augmented with £2,000 more. This son died in 1831, aged eighty-three.

William Strahan, the son of a Scotch Customhouse officer, had come up to London a poor printers' boy, and worked his way to wealth and social distinction. He was associated with Cadell in the purchase of copyrights, on the death of Cadell's partner and former master, Andrew Millar, who died circa 1768. The names of Strahan and Cadell appeared on the title-pages of the great works of Gibbon, Robertson, Adam Smith, and Blackstone. In 1776 Hume wrote to Strahan, "There will be no books of reputation now to be printed in London, but through your hands and Mr. Cadell's." Gibbon's history was a vast success. The first edition of 1,000 went off in a few days. This produced £490, of which Gibbon received £326 13s. 4d. The great history was finished in 1788, by the publication of the fourth quarto volume. It appeared on the author's fifty-first birthday, and the double festival was celebrated by a dinner at Mr. Cadell's, when complimentary verses from that wretched poet, Hayley, made the great man with the button-hole mouth blush or feign to blush. That was a proud day for Gibbon, and a proud day for Messrs. Cadell and Strahan.

The first Strahan, Johnson's friend, was M.P. for Malmesbury and Wootton Bassett (1775-84), and his taking to a carriage was the subject of a recorded conversation between Boswell and Johnson, who gloried in his friend's success. It was Strahan who, with Johnston and Dodsley, purchased, in 1759, for £100, the first edition of Johnson's "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia," that sententious story, which Johnson wrote in a week, to defray the expenses of his mother's funeral.

Boswell has recorded several conversations between Dr. Johnson and Strahan. Strahan, at the doctor's return from the Hebrides, asked him, with a firm tone of voice, what he thought of his country. "That it is a very vile country, to be sure, sir," returned for answer Dr. Johnson. "Well, sir," replied the other, somewhat mortified, "God made it." "Certainly he did," answered Dr. Johnson again; "but we must always remember that he made it for Scotchmen, and--comparisons are odious, Mr. Strahan--but God made hell."

Boswell has also a pretty anecdote relating to one of the doctor's visits to Strahan's printing-office, which shows the "Great Bear" in a very amiable light, and the scene altogether is not unworthy of the artist's pencil.

"Mr. Strahan," says Boswell, "had taken a poor boy from the country as an apprentice, upon Johnson's recommendation. Johnson having inquired after him, said, 'Mr. Strahan, let me have five guineas on account, and I'll give this boy one. Nay, if a man recommends a boy, and does nothing for him, it is a sad work. Call him down.' I followed him into the courtyard, behind Mr. Strahan's house, and there I had a proof of what I heard him profess--that he talked alike to all. 'Some people will tell you that they let themselves down to the capacity of their hearers. I never do that. I speak uniformly in as intelligible a manner as I can.' 'Well, my boy, how do you go on?' 'Pretty well, sir; but they are afraid I'm not strong enough for some parts of the business.' Johnson: 'Why, I shall be sorry for it; for when you consider with how little mental power and corporal labour a printer can get a guinea a week, it is a very desirable occupation for you. Do you hear? Take all the pains you can; and if this does not do, we must think of some other way of life for you. There's a guinea.' Here was one of the many instances of his active benevolence. At the same time the slow and sonorous solemnity with which, while he bent himself down, he addressed a little thick, short-legged boy, contrasted with the boy's awkwardness and awe, could not but excite some ludicrous emotions."

In Ireland Yard, on the west side of St. Andrew's Hill, and in the parish of St. Anne, Blackfriars, stood the house which Shakespeare bought, in the year 1612, and which he bequeathed by will to his daughter, Susanna Hall. In the deed of conveyance to the poet, the house is described as "abutting upon a street leading down to Puddle Wharf, and now or late in the tenure or occupation of one William Ireland" (hence, we suppose, Ireland Yard), "part of which said tenement is erected over a great gate leading to a capital messuage, which some time was in the tenure of William Blackwell, Esq., deceased, and since that in the tenure or occupation of the Right Honourable Henry, now Earl of Northumberland." The original deed of conveyance is shown in the City of London Library, at Guildhall, under a handsome glass case.

The street leading down to Puddle Wharf is called St. Andrew's Hill, from the Church of St. Andrew's-in-the-Wardrobe. The proper name (says Cunningham) is Puddle Dock Hill.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XIX. LUDGATE HILL

An Ugly Bridge and "Ye Belle Savage"--A Radical Publisher--The Principal Gate of London--From a Fortress to a Prison--"Remember the Poor Prisoners"--Relics of Early Times--St. Martin's, Ludgate--The London Coffee House--Celebrated Goldsmiths on Ludgate Hill--Mrs. Rundell's Cookery Book--Stationers' Hall--Old Burgavenny House and its History--Early Days of the Stationers' Company--The Almanacks--An Awkward Misprint--The Hall and its Decorations--The St. Cecilia Festivals--Dryden's "St. Cecilia's Day" and "Alexander's Feast"--Handel's Setting of them--A Modest Poet--Funeral Feasts and Political Banquets--The Company's Plate--Their Charities--The Pictures at Stationers' Hall--The Company's Arms--Famous Masters.

Of all the eyesores of modern London, surely the most hideous is the Ludgate Hill Viaduct--that enormous flat iron that lies across the chest of Ludgate Hill like a bar of metal on the breast of a wretch in a torture-chamber. Let us hope that a time will come when all designs for City improvements will be compelled to endure the scrutiny and win the approval of a committee of taste. The useful and the beautiful must not for ever be divorced. The railway bridge lies flat across the street, only eighteen feet above the roadway, and is a miracle of clumsy and stubborn ugliness, entirely spoiling the approach to one of the finest buildings in London. The five girders of wrought iron cross the street, here only forty-two feet wide, and the span is sixty feet, in order to allow of future enlargement of the street. Absurd lattice-work, decorative brackets, bronze armorial medallions, and gas lanterns and standards, form a combination that only the unsettled and imitative art of the ruthless nineteenth century could have put together. Think of what the Egyptians in the times of the Pharaohs did with granite! and observe what we Englishmen of the present day do with iron. Observe this vulgar daubing of brown paint and barbaric gilding, and think of what the Moors did with colour in the courts of the Alhambra! A viaduct was necessary, we allow, but such a viaduct even the architect of the National Gallery would have shuddered at. The difficulties, we however allow, were great. The London, Chatham, and Dover, eager for dividends, was bent on wedding the Metropolitan Railway near Smithfield; but how could the hands of the affianced couple be joined? If there was no viaduct, there must be a tunnel. Now, the bank of the river being a very short distance from Smithfield, a very steep and dangerous gradient would have been required to effect the junction. Moreover, had the line been carried under Ludgate Hill, there must have been a slight detour to ease the ascent, the cost of which detour would have been enormous. The tunnel proposed would have involved the destruction of a few trifles--such, for instance, as Apothecaries' Hall, the churchyard adjoining, the Times printing office--besides doing injury to the foundations of St. Martin's Church, the Old Bailey Sessions House, and Newgate. Moreover, no station would have been possible between the Thames and Smithfield. The puzzled inhabitants, therefore, ended in despair by giving evidence in favour of the viaduct. The stolid hammermen went to work, and the iron nightmare was set up in all its Babylonian hideousness.

The enormous sum of upwards of £10,000 was awarded as the Metropolitan Board's quota for removing the hoarding, for widening the pavement a few feet under the railway bridge over Ludgate Hill, and for rounding off the corner.

An incredible quantity of ink has been shed about the origin of the sign of the "Belle Sauvage" inn, and even now the controversy is scarcely settled. Mr. Riley records that in 1380 (Richard II.) a certain William Lawton was sentenced to an uncomfortable hour in the pillory for trying to obtain, by means of a forged letter, twenty shillings from William Savage, Fleet Street, in the parish of St. Bridget. This at least shows that Savage was the name of a citizen of the locality. In 1453 (Henry VI.) a clause roll quoted by Mr. Lysons notices the bequest of John French to his mother, Joan French, widow, of "Savage's Inn," otherwise called the "Bell in the Hoop," in the parish of St. Bride's. Stow (Elizabeth) mentions a Mrs. Savage as having given the inn to the Cutlers' Company, which, however, the books of that company disprove. This, anyhow, is certain, that in 1568 (Elizabeth) a John Craythorne gave the reversion of the "Belle Sauvage" to the Cutlers' Company, on condition that two exhibitions to the university and certain sums to poor prisoners be paid by them out of the estate. A portrait of Craythorne's wife still hangs in Cutler's Hall. In 1584 the inn was described as "Ye Belle Savage." In 1648 and 1672 the landlords' tokens exhibited (says Mr. Noble) an Indian woman holding a bow and arrow. The sign in Queen Anne's time was a savage man standing by a bell. The question, therefore, is, whether the name of the inn was originally derived from Isabel (Bel) Savage, the landlady, or the sign of the bell and savage; or whether it was, as the Spectator cleverly suggests, from La Belle Sauvage, "the beautiful savage," which is a derivation very generally received. There is an old French romance formerly popular in this country, the heroine of which was known as La Belle Sauvage; and it is possible that Mrs. Isabel Savage, the ancient landlady, might have become in time confused with the heroine of the old romance.

In the ante-Shakespearean days our early actors performed in inn-yards, the courtyard representing the pit, the upper and lower galleries the boxes and gallery of the modern theatre. The "Belle Sauvage," says Mr. Collier, was a favourite place for these performances. There was also a school of defence, or fencing school, here in Queen Elizabeth's time; so many a hot Tybalt and fiery Mercutio have here crossed rapiers, and many a silk button has been reft from gay doublets by the quick passadoes of the young swordsmen who ruffled it in the Strand. This quondam inn was also the place where Banks, the showman (so often mentioned by Nash and others in Elizabethan pamphlets and lampoons), exhibited his wonderful trained horse "Marocco," the animal which once ascended the tower of St. Paul's, and who on another occasion, at his master's bidding, delighted the mob by selecting Tarleton, the low comedian, as the greatest fool present. Banks eventually took his horse, which was shod with silver, to Rome, and the priests, frightened at the circus tricks, burnt both "Marocco" and his master for witchcraft. At No. 11 in this yard--now such a little world of industry, although it no longer rings with the stage-coach horn--lived in his obscurer days that great carver in wood, Grinling Gibbons, whose genius Evelyn first brought under the notice of Charles II. Horace Walpole says that, as a sort of advertisement, Gibbons carved an exquisite pot of flowers in wood, which stood on his window-sill, and shook surprisingly with the motion of the coaches that passed beneath. No man (says Walpole) before Gibbons had "ever given to wood the loose and airy lightness of flowers, or linked together the various productions of the elements with a free disorder natural to each species." His chef d'oeuvre of skill was an imitation point-lace cravat, which he carved at Chatsworth for the Duke of Devonshire. Petworth is also garlanded with Gibbons' fruit, flowers, and dead game.

Belle Sauvage Yard no longer re-echoes with the guard's rejoicing horn, and the old coaching interest is now only represented by a railway parcel office huddled up in the left-hand corner. The old galleries are gone over which pretty chambermaids leant and waved their dusters in farewell greeting to the handsome guards or smart coachmen. Industries of a very different character have now turned the old yard into a busy hive. It is not for us to dilate upon the firm whose operations are carried on here, but it may interest the reader to know that the very sheet he is now perusing was printed on the site of the old coaching inn, and published very near the old tap-room of La Belle Sauvage; for where coach-wheels once rolled and clattered, only printing-press wheels now revolve.

The old inn-yard is now very much altered in plan from what it was in former days. Originally it consisted of two courts. Into the outer one of these the present archway from Ludgate Hill led. It at one period certainly had contained private houses, in one of which Grinling Gibbons had lived. The inn stood round an inner court, entered by a second archway which stood about half-way up the present yard. Over the archway facing the outer court was the sign of "The Bell," and all round the interior ran those covered galleries, so prominent a feature in old London inns.

Near the "Belle Sauvage" resided that proud cobbler mentioned by Steele, who has recorded his eccentricities. This man had bought a wooden figure of a beau of the period, who stood before him in a bending position, and humbly presented him with his awl, wax, bristles, or whatever else his tyrannical master chose to place in his hand.

To No. 45 (south side), Ludgate Hill, that strange, independent man, Lamb's friend, William Hone, the Radical publisher, came from Ship Court, Old Bailey, where he had published those blasphemous "Parodies," for which he was three times tried and acquitted, to the vexation of Lord Ellenborough. Here, having sown his seditious wild oats and broken free from the lawyers, Hone continued his occasional clever political satires, sometimes suggested by bitter Hazlitt and illustrated by George Cruikshank's inexhaustible fancy. Here Hone devised those delightful miscellanies, the "Every-Day Book" and "Year Book," into which Lamb and many young poets threw all their humour and power. The books were commercially not very successful, but they have delighted generations, and will delight generations to come. Mr. Timbs, who saw much of Hone, describes him as sitting in a second-floor back room, surrounded by rare books and black-letter volumes. His conversion from materialism to Christianity was apparently sudden, though the process of change had no doubt long been maturing. The story of his conversion is thus related by Mr. Timbs:--"Hone was once called to a house, in a certain street in a part of the world of London entirely unknown to him. As he walked he reflected on the entirely unknown region. He arrived at the house, and was shown into a room to wait. All at once, on looking round, to his astonishment and almost horror, every object he saw seemed familiar to him. He said to himself, 'What is this? I was never here before, and yet I have seen all this before, and as a proof I have I now remember a very peculiar knot behind the shutters.' He opened the shutters, and found the very knot. 'Now, then,' he thought, 'here is something I cannot explain on any principle--there must be some power beyond matter.'" The argument that so happily convinced Hone does not seem to us in itself as very convincing. Hone's recognition of the room was but some confused memory of an analogous place. Knots are not uncommon in deal shutters, and the discovery of the knot in the particular place was a mere coincidence. But, considering that Hone was a self-educated man, and, like many sceptics, was incredulous only with regard to Christianity, and even believed he once saw an apparition in Ludgate Hill, who can be surprised?

At No. 7, opposite Hone's, "The Percy Anecdotes," that well-chosen and fortunate selection of every sort of story, were first published.

Lud Gate, which Stow in his "Survey" designates the sixth and principal gate of London, taken down in 1760 at the solicitation of the chief inhabitants of Farringdon Without and Farringdon Within, stood between the present London Tavern and the church of St. Martin. According to old Geoffry of Monmouth's fabulous history of England, this entrance to London was first built by King Lud, a British monarch, sixty-six years before Christ. Our later antiquaries, ruthless as to legends, however romantic, consider its original name to have been the Flood or Fleet Gate, which is far more feasible. Lud Gate was either repaired or rebuilt in the year 1215, when the armed barons, under Robert Fitzwalter, repulsed at Northampton, were welcomed to London, and there awaited King John's concession of the Magna Charta. While in the metropolis these greedy and fanatical barons spent their time in spoiling the houses of the rich Jews, and used the stones in strengthening the walls and gates of the City. That this tradition is true was proved in 1586, when (as Stow says) all the gate was rebuilt. Embedded among other stones was found one on which was engraved, in Hebrew characters, the words "This is the ward of Rabbi Moses, the son of the honourable Rabbi Isaac." This stone was probably the sign of one of the Jewish houses pulled down by Fitzwalter, Magnaville, and the Earl of Gloucester, perhaps for the express purpose of obtaining ready materials for strengthening the bulwarks of London. In 1260 (Henry III.) Lud Gate was repaired, and beautified with images of King Lud and other monarchs. In the reign of Edward VI. the citizens, zealous against everything that approached idolatry, smote off the heads of Lud and his family; but Queen Mary, partial to all images, afterwards replaced the heads on the old bodies.

In 1554 King Lud and his sons looked down on a street seething with angry men, and saw blood shed upon the hill leading to St. Paul's. Sir Thomas Wyat, a Kentish gentleman, urged by the Earl of Devon, and led on by the almost universal dread of Queen Mary's marriage with the bigoted Philip of Spain, assembled 1,500 armed men at Rochester Castle, and, aided by 500 Londoners, who deserted to him, raised the standard of insurrection. Five vessels of the fleet joined him, and with seven pieces of artillery, captured from the Duke of Norfolk, he marched upon London. Soon followed by 15,000 men, eager to save the Princess Elizabeth, Wyat marched through Dartford to Greenwich and Deptford. With a force now dwindled to 7,000 men, Wyat attacked London Bridge. Driven from there by the Tower guns, he marched to Kingston, crossed the river, resolving to beat back the Queen's troops at Brentford, and attempt to enter the City by Lud Gate, which some of the Protestant citizens had offered to throw open to him. The Queen, with true Tudor courage, refused to leave St. James's, and in a council of war it was agreed to throw a strong force into Lud Gate, and, permitting Wyat's advance up Fleet Street, to enclose him like a wild boar in the toils. At nine on a February morning, 1554, Wyat reached Hyde Park Corner, was cannonaded at Hay Hill, and further on towards Charing Cross he and some three or four hundred men were cut off from his other followers. Rushing on with a standard through Piccadilly, Wyat reached Lud Gate. There (says Stow) he knocked, calling out, "I am Wyat; the Queen has granted all my petitions."

But the only reply from the strongly-guarded gate was the rough, stern voice of Lord William Howard--"Avaunt, traitor; thou shalt have no entrance here."

No friends appearing, and the Royal troops closing upon him, Wyat said, "I have kept my promise," and retiring, silent and desponding, sat down to rest on a stall opposite the gate of the "Belle Sauvage." Roused by the shouts and sounds of fighting, he fought his way back, with forty of his staunchest followers, to Temple Bar, which was held by a squadron of horse. There the Norroy King-of-Arms exhorted him to spare blood and yield himself a prisoner. Wyat then surrendered himself to Sir Maurice Berkeley, who just then happened to ride by, ignorant of the affray, and, seated behind Sir Maurice, he was taken to St. James's. On April 11th Wyat perished on the scaffold at Tower Hill. This rash rebellion also led to the immediate execution of the innocent and unhappy Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Guilford Dudley, endangered the life of the Princess Elizabeth, and hastened the Queen's marriage with Philip, which took place at Winchester, July 25th of the same year.

In the reign of Elizabeth (1586), the old gate, being "sore decayed," was pulled down, and was newly built, with images of Lud and others on the east side, and a "picture of the lion-hearted queen" on the west, the cost of the whole being over £1,500.

Lud Gate became a free debtors' prison the first year of Richard II., and was enlarged in 1463 (Edward IV.) by that "well-disposed, blessed, and devout woman," the widow of Stephen Forster, fishmonger, Mayor of London in 1454. Of this benefactress of Lud Gate, Maitland (1739) has the following legend. Forster himself, according to this story, in his younger days had once been a pining prisoner in Lud Gate. Being one day at the begging grate, a rich widow asked how much would release him. He said, "Twenty pounds." She paid it, and took him into her service, where, by his indefatigable application to business, he so gained her affections that she married him, and he earned so great riches by commerce that she concurred with him to make his former prison more commodious, and to endow a new chapel, where, on a wall, there was this inscription on a brass plate:--

"Devout souls that pass this way, For Stephen Forster, late Lord Mayor, heartily pray, And Dame Agnes, his spouse, to God consecrate, That of pity this house made for Londoners in Lud Gate; So that for lodging and water prisoners here nought pay, As their keepers shall all answer at dreadful doomsday."

This legend of Lud Gate is also the foundation of Rowley's comedy of A Woman Never Vext; or, The Widow of Cornhill, which has in our times been revived, with alterations, by Mr. Planché. In the first scene of the fifth act occurs the following passage:--

"Mrs. S. Forster. But why remove the prisoners from Ludgate?

"Stephen Forster. To take the prison down and build it new, With leads to walk on, chambers large and fair; For when myself lay there the noxious air Choked up my spirits. None but captives, wife, Can know what captives feel."

Stow, however, seems to deny this story, and suggests that it arose from some mistake. The stone with the inscription was preserved by Stow when the gate was rebuilt, together with Forster's arms, "three broad arrow-heads," and was fixed over the entry to the prison. The enlargement of the prison on the south-east side formed a quadrant thirty-eight feet long and twenty-nine feet wide. There were prisoners' rooms above it, with a leaden roof, where the debtors could walk, and both lodging and water were free of charge.

Strype says the prisoners in Ludgate were chiefly merchants and tradesmen, who had been driven to want by losses at sea. When King Philip came to London after his marriage with Mary in 1554 thirty prisoners in Lud Gate, who were in gaol for £10,000, compounded for at £2,000, presented the king a well-penned Latin speech, written by "the curious pen" of Roger Ascham, praying the king to redress their miseries, and by his royal generosity to free them, inasmuch as the place was not sceleratorum carcer, sed miserorum custodia (not a dungeon for the wicked, but a place of detention for the wretched).

Marmaduke Johnson, a poor debtor in Lud Gate the year before the Restoration, wrote a curious account of the prison, which Strype printed. The officials in "King Lud's House" seem to have been--1, a reader of Divine service; 2, the upper steward, called the master of the box; 3, the under steward; 4, seven assistants--that is, one for every day of the week; 5, a running assistant; 6, two churchwardens; 7, a scavenger; 8, a chamberlain; 9, a runner; 10, the cryers at the grate, six in number, who by turns kept up the ceaseless cry to the passers-by of "Remember the poor prisoners!" The officers' charge (says Johnson) for taking a debtor to Ludgate was sometimes three, four, or five shillings, though their just due is but twopence; for entering name and address, fourteen pence to the turnkey; a lodging is one penny, twopence, or threepence; for sheets to the chamberlain, eighteenpence; to chamber-fellows a garnish of four shillings (for non-payment of this his clothes were taken away, or "mobbed," as it was called, till he did pay); and the next day a due of sixteen pence to one of the stewards, which was called table money. At his discharge the several fees were as follows:--Two shillings the master's fee; fourteen pence for the turning of the key; twelve pence for every action that lay against him. For leave to go out with a keeper upon security (as formerly in the Queen's Bench) the prisoners paid for the first time four shillings and tenpence, and two shillings every day afterwards. The exorbitant prison fees of three shillings a day swallowed up all the prison bequests, and the miserable debtors had to rely on better means from the Lord Mayor's table, the light bread seized by the clerk of the markets, and presents of under-sized and illegal fish from the water-bailiffs.

A curious handbill of the year 1664, preserved by Mr. Collier, and containing the petition of 180 poor Ludgate prisoners, seems to have been a circular taken round by the alms-seekers of the prison, who perambulated the streets with baskets at their backs and a sealed money-box in their hands. "We most humbly beseech you," says the handbill, "even for God's cause, to relieve us with your charitable benevolence, and to put into this bearer's box--the same being sealed with the house seal, as it is figured upon this petition."

A quarto tract, entitled "Prison Thoughts," by Thomas Browning, citizen and cook of London, a prisoner in Lud Gate, "where poor citizens are confined and starve amidst copies of their freedom," was published in that prison, by the author, in 1682. It is written both in prose and verse, and probably gave origin to Dr. Dodd's more elaborate work on the same subject. The following is a specimen of the poetry:--

"ON PATIENCE.

"Patience is the poor man's walk, Patience is the dumb man's talk, Patience is the lame man's thighs, Patience is the blind man's eyes, Patience is the poor man's ditty, Patience is the exil'd man's city, Patience is the sick man's bed of down, Patience is the wise man's crown, Patience is the live man's story, Patience is the dead man's glory.

"When your troubles do controul, In Patience then possess your soul."

In the Spectator (Queen Anne) a writer says: "Passing under Lud Gate the other day, I heard a voice bawling for charity which I thought I had heard somewhere before. Coming near to the grate, the prisoner called me by my name, and desired I would throw something into the box."

The prison at Lud Gate was gutted by the Great Fire of 1666, and in 1760, the year of George III.'s accession, the gate, impeding traffic, was taken down, and the materials sold for £148. The prisoners were removed to the London Workhouse, in Bishopsgate Street, a part whereof was fitted up for that purpose, and Lud Gate prisoners continued to be received there until the year 1794, when they were removed to the prison of Lud Gate, adjoining the compter in Giltspur Street.

When old Lud Gate was pulled down, Lud and his worthy sons were given by the City to Sir Francis Gosling, who intended to set them up at the east end of St. Dunstan's. Nevertheless the royal effigies, of very rude workmanship, were sent to end their days in the parish bone-house; a better fate, however, awaited them, for the late Marquis of Hertford eventually purchased them, and they are now, with St. Dunstan's clock, in Hertford Villa, Regent's Park. The statue of Elizabeth was placed in a niche in the outer wall of old St. Dunstan's Church, and it still adorns the new church, as we have before mentioned in our chapter on Fleet Street.

In 1792 an interesting discovery was made in St. Martin's Court, Ludgate Hill. Workmen came upon the remains of a small barbican, or watch-tower, part of the old City wall of 1276; and in a line with the Old Bailey they found another outwork. A fragment of it in a court is now built up. A fire which took place on the premises of Messrs. Kay, Ludgate Hill, May 1, 1792, disclosed these interesting ruins, probably left by the builders after the fire of 1666 as a foundation for new buildings. The tower projected four feet from the wall into the City ditch, and measured twenty-two feet from top to bottom. The stones were of different sizes, the largest and the corner rudely squared. They had been bound together with cement of hot lime, so that wedges had to be used to split the blocks asunder. Small square holes in the sides of the tower seemed to have been used either to receive floor timbers, or as peep-holes for the sentries. The adjacent part of the City wall was about eight feet thick, and of rude workmanship, consisting of irregular-sized stones, chalk, and flint. The only bricks seen in this part of the wall were on the south side, bounding Stone-cutters' Alley. On the east half of Chatham Place, Blackfriars Bridge, stood the tower built by order of Edward I., at the end of a continuation of the City wall, running from Lud Gate behind the houses in Fleet Ditch to the Thames. A rare plan of London, by Hollar (says Mr. J.T. Smith), marks this tower. Roman monuments have been so frequently dug up near St. Martin's Church, that there is no doubt that a Roman extra-mural cemetery once existed here; in the same locality, in 1800, a sepulchral monument was dug up, dedicated to Claudina Mertina, by her husband, a Roman soldier. A fragment of a statue of Hercules and a female head were also found, and were preserved at the "London" Coffee House.

Ludgate Hill and Street is probably the greatest thoroughfare in London. Through Ludgate Hill and Street there have passed in twelve hours 8,752 vehicles, 13,025 horses, and 105,352 persons.

St. Martin's, Ludgate, though one of Wren's churches, is not a romantic building; yet it has its legends. Robert of Gloucester, a rhyming chronicler, describes it as built by Cadwallo, a British prince, in the seventh century:--

"A chirch of Sent Martyn livying he let rere, In whyche yet man should Goddy's seruys do, And singe for his soule, and al Christine also."

The church seems to have been rebuilt in 1437 (Henry VI.). From the parish books, which commence in 1410, we find the old church to have had several chapels, and to have been well furnished with plate, paintings, and vestments, and to have had two projecting porches on the south side, next Ludgate Hill. The right of presentation to St. Martin's belonged to the Abbot of Westminster, but Queen Mary granted it to the Bishop of London. The following curious epitaph in St. Martin's, found also elsewhere, has been beautifully paraphrased by the Quaker poet, Bernard Barton:--

Earth goes to } { As mold to mold, Earth treads on } Earth, { Glittering in gold, Earth as to } { Return nere should, Earth shall to } { Goe ere he would.

Earth upon } { Consider may, Earth goes to } Earth, { Naked away, Earth though on } { Be stout and gay, Earth shall from } { Passe poore away.

Strype says of St. Martin's--"It is very comely, and ascended up by stone steps, well finished within; and hath a most curious spire steeple, of excellent workmanship, pleasant to behold." The new church stands farther back than the old. The little black spire that adorns the tower rises from a small bulb of a cupola, round which runs a light gallery. Between the street and the body of the church Wren, always ingenious, contrived an ambulatory the whole depth of the tower, to deaden the sound of passing traffic. The church is a cube, the length 57 feet, the breadth 66 feet; the spire, 168 feet high, is dwarfed by St. Paul's. The church cost in erection £5,378 18s. 8d.

The composite pillars, organ balcony, and oaken altar-piece are tasteless and pagan. The font was the gift of Thomas Morley, in 1673, and is encircled by a favourite old Greek palindrome, that is, a puzzle sentence that reads equally well backwards or forwards--

"Tripson anomeema me monan opsin." (Cleanse thy sins, not merely thy outward self.)

This inscription, according to Mr. G. Godwin ("Churches of London"), is also found on the font in the basilica of St. Sophia, Constantinople. In the vestry-room, approached by a flight of stairs at the north-east angle of the church, there is a carved seat (date 1690) and several chests, covered with curious indented ornaments.

On this church, and other satellites of St. Paul's, a poet has written--

"So, like a bishop upon dainties fed, St. Paul's lifts up his sacerdotal head; While his lean curates, slim and lank to view, Around him point their steeples to the blue."

Coleridge used to compare a Mr. H----, who was always putting himself forward to interpret Fox's sentiments, to the steeple of St. Martin's, which is constantly getting in the way when you wish to see the dome of St. Paul's.

One great man, at least, has been connected with this church, where the Knights Templars were put to trial, and that was good old Purchas, the editor and enlarger of "Hakluyt's Voyages." He was rector of this parish. Hakluyt was a prebendary of Westminster, who, with a passion for geographical research, though he himself never ventured farther than Paris, had devoted his life, encouraged by Drake and Raleigh, in collecting from old libraries and the lips of venturous merchants and sea-captains travels in various countries. The manuscript remains were bought by Purchas, who, with a veneration worthy of that heroic and chivalrous age, wove them into his "Pilgrims" (five vols., folio), which are a treasury of travel, exploit, and curious adventures. It has been said that Purchas ruined himself by this publication, and that he died in prison. This is not, however, true. He seems to have impoverished himself chiefly by taking upon himself the care and cost of his brother and brother-in-law's children. He appears to have been a single-minded man, with a thorough devotion to geographic study. Charles I. promised him a deanery, but Purchas did not live to enjoy it.

There is an architectural tradition that Wren purposely designed the spire of St. Martin's, Ludgate, small and slender, to give a greater dignity to the dome of St. Paul's.

The London Coffee House, 24 to 26, Ludgate Hill, a place of celebrity in its day, was first opened in May, 1731. The proprietor, James Ashley, in his advertisement announcing the opening, professes cheap prices, especially for punch. The usual price of a quart of arrack was then eight shillings, and six shillings for a quart of rum made into punch. This new punch house, Dorchester beer, and Welsh ale warehouse, on the contrary, professed to charge six shillings for a quart of arrack made into punch; while a quart of rum or brandy made into punch was to be four shillings, and half a quartern fourpence halfpenny, and gentlemen were to have punch as quickly made as a gill of wine could be drawn. After Roney and Ellis, the house, according to Mr. Timbs, was taken by Messrs. Leech and Dallimore. Mr. Leech was the father of one of the most admirable caricaturists of modern times. Then came Mr. Lovegrove, from the "Horn," Doctors' Commons. In 1856 Mr. Robert Clarke took possession, and was the last tenant, the house being closed in 1867, and purchased by the Corporation for £38,000. Several lodges of Freemasons and sundry clubs were wont to assemble here periodically--among them "The Sons of Industry," to which many of the influential tradesmen of the wards of Farringdon have been long attached. Here, too, in the large hall, the juries from the Central Criminal Court were lodged during the night when important cases lasted more than one day. During the Exeter Hall May meetings the London Coffee House was frequently resorted to as a favourite place of meeting. It was also noted for its publishers' sales of stocks and copyrights. It was within the rules of the Fleet Prison. At the bar of the London Coffee House was sold Rowley's British Cephalic Snuff. A singular incident occurred here many years since. Mr. Brayley, the topographer, was present at a party, when Mr. Broadhurst, the famous tenor, by singing a high note caused a wine-glass on the table to break, the bowl being separated from the stem.

At No. 32 (north side) for many years Messrs. Rundell and Bridge, the celebrated goldsmiths and diamond merchants, carried on their business. Here Flaxman's chef d'oeuvre, the Shield of Achilles, in silver gilt, was executed; also the crown worn by that august monarch, George IV. at his coronation, for the loan of the jewels of which £7,000 was charged, and among the elaborate luxuries a gigantic silver wine-cooler (now at Windsor), that took two years in chasing. Two men could be seated inside that great cup, and on grand occasions it has been filled with wine and served round to the guests. Two golden salmon, leaning against each other, was the sign of this old shop, now removed. Mrs. Rundell met a great want of her day by writing her well-known book, "The Art of Cookery," published in 1806, and which has gone through countless editions. Up to 1833 she had received no remuneration for it, but she ultimately obtained 2,000 guineas. People had no idea of cooking in those days; and she laments in her preface the scarcity of good melted butter, good toast and water, and good coffee. Her directions were sensible and clear; and she studied economical cooking, which great cooks like Ude and Francatelli despised. It is not every one who can afford to prepare for a good dish by stewing down half-a-dozen hams.

The hall of the Stationers' Company hides itself with the modesty of an author in Stationers' Hall Court, Ludgate Hill, close abutting on Paternoster Row, a congenial neighbourhood. This hall of the master, and keeper, and wardens, and commonalty of the mystery or art of the Stationers of the City of London stands on the site of Burgavenny House, which the Stationers modified and re-erected in the third and fourth years of Philip and Mary--the dangerous period when the company was first incorporated. The old house had been, in the reign of Edward III., the palace of John, Duke of Bretagne and Earl of Richmond. It was afterwards occupied by the Earls of Pembroke. In Elizabeth's reign it belonged to Lord Abergavenny, whose daughter married Sir Thomas Vane. In 1611 (James I.) the Stationers' Company purchased it and took complete possession. The house was swept away in the Great Fire of 1666, when the Stationers--the greatest sufferers on that occasion--lost property to the amount of £200,000.

The fraternity of the Stationers of London (says Mr. John Gough Nichols, F.S.A., who has written a most valuable and interesting historical notice of the Worshipful Company) is first mentioned in the fourth year of Henry IV., when their bye-laws were approved by the City authorities, and they are then described as "writers (transcribers), lymners of books and dyverse things for the Church and other uses." In early times all special books were protected by special letters patent, so that the early registers of Stationers' Hall chiefly comprise books of entertainment, sermons, pamphlets, and ballads.

Mary originally incorporated the society in order to put a stop to heretical writings, and gave the Company power to search in any shop, house, chamber, or building of printer, binder, or seller, for books published contrary to statutes, acts, and proclamations. King James, in the first year of his reign, by letters-patent, granted the Stationers' Company the exclusive privilege of printing Almanacs, Primers, Psalters, the A B C, the "Little Catechism," and Nowell's Catechism.

The Stationers' Company, for two important centuries in English history (says Mr. Cunningham), had pretty well the monopoly of learning. Printers were obliged to serve their time to a member of the Company; and almost every publication, from a Bible to a ballad, was required to be "entered at Stationers' Hall." The service is now unnecessary, but Parliament still requires, under the recent Copyright Act, that the proprietor of every published work should register his claim in the books of the Stationers' Company, and pay a fee of five shillings. The number of the freemen of the Company is between 1,000 and 1,100, and of the livery, or leading persons, about 450. The capital of the Company amounts to upwards of £40,000, divided into shares, varying in value from £40 to £400 each. The great treasure of the Stationers' Company is its series of registers of works entered for publication. This valuable collection of entries commences in 1557, and, though often consulted and quoted, was never properly understood till Mr. J. Payne Collier published two carefully-edited volumes of extracts from its earlier pages.

The celebrated Bible of the year 1632, with the important word "not" omitted in the seventh commandment--"Thou shalt not commit adultery"--was printed by the Stationers' Company. Archbishop Laud made a Star-Chamber matter of the omission, and a heavy fine was laid upon the Company for their neglect. And in another later edition, in Psalm xiv. the text ran, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is a God." For the omission of the important word "no" the printer was fined £3,000. Several other errors have occurred, but the wonder is that they have not been more frequent.

The only publications which the Company continues to issue are a Latin gradus and almanacks, of which it had at one time the entire monopoly. Almanack-day at Stationers' Hall (every 22nd of November, at three o'clock) is a sight worth seeing, from the bustle of the porters anxious to get off with early supplies. The Stationers' Company's almanacks are now by no means the best of the day. Mr. Charles Knight, who worked so strenuously and so successfully for the spread of popular education, first struck a blow at the absurd monopoly of almanack printing. So much behind the age is this privileged Company, that it actually still continues to publish Moore's quack almanack, with the nonsensical old astrological tables, describing the moon's influence on various parts of the human body. One year it is said they had the courage to leave out this farrago, with the hieroglyphics originally stolen by Lilly from monkish manuscripts, and from Lilly stolen by Moore. The result was that most of the copies were returned on their hands. They have not since dared to oppose the stolid force of vulgar ignorance. They still publish Wing's sheet almanack, though Wing was an impostor and fortune-teller, who died eight years after the Restoration. All this is very unworthy of a privileged company, with an invested capital of £40,000, and does not much help forward the enlightenment of the poorer classes. This Company is entitled, for the supposed security of the copyright, to two copies of every work, however costly, published in the United Kingdom, a mischievous tax, which restrains the publication of many valuable but expensive works.

The first Stationers' Hall was in Milk Street. In 1553 they removed to St. Peter's College, near St. Paul's Deanery, where the chantry priests of St. Paul's had previously resided. The present hall closely resembles the hall at Bridewell, having a row of oval windows above the lower range, which were fitted up by Mr. Mylne in 1800, when the chamber was cased with Portland stone and the lower windows lengthened.

The great window at the upper end of the hall was erected in 1801, at the expense of Mr. Alderman Cadell. It includes some older glass blazoned with the arms and crest of the company, the two emblematic figures of Religion and Learning being designed by Smirke. Like most ancient halls, it has a raised dais, or haut place, which is occupied by the Court table at the two great dinners in August and November. On the wall, above the wainscoting that has glowed red with the reflection of many a bumper of generous wine, are hung in decorous state the pavises or shields of arms of members of the court, which in civic processions are usually borne by a body of pensioners, the number of whom, when the Lord Mayor is a member of the Company, corresponds with the years of that august dignitary's age. In the old water-show these escutcheons decorated the sides of the Company's barge when they accompanied the Lord Mayor to Westminster, and called at the landing of Lambeth Palace to pay their respects to the representative of their former ecclesiastical censors. On this occasion the Archbishop usually sent out the thirsty Stationers a hamper of wine, while the rowers of the barge had bread and cheese and ale to their hearts' content. It is still the custom (says Mr. Nichols) to forward the Archbishop annually a set of the Company's almanacks, and some also to the Lord Chancellor and the Master of the Rolls. Formerly the twelve judges and various other persons received the same compliment. Alas for the mutation of other things than almanacs, however; for in 1850 the Company's barge, being sold, was taken to Oxford, where it may still be seen on the Isis, the property of one of the College boat clubs. At the upper end of the hall is a court cupboard or buffet for the display of the Company's plate, and at the lower end, on either side of the doorway, is a similar recess. The entrance-screen of the hall, guarded by allegorical figures, and crowned by the royal arms (with the inescutcheon of Nassau--William III.), is richly adorned with carvings.

Stationers' Hall was in 1677 used for Divine service by the parish of St. Martin's, Ludgate, and towards the end of the seventeenth century an annual musical festival was instituted on the 22nd of November, in commemoration of Saint Cecilia, and as an excuse for some good music. A splendid entertainment was provided in the hall, preceded by a grand concert of vocal and instrumental music, which was attended by people of the first rank. The special attraction was always an ode to Saint Cecilia, set by Purcell, Blow, or some other eminent composer of the day. Dryden's and Pope's odes are almost too well known to need mention; but Addison, Yalden, Shadwell, and even D'Urfey, tried their hands on praises of the same musical saint.

After several odes by the mediocre satirist, Oldham, and that poor verse-maker, Nahum Tate, who scribbled upon King David's tomb, came Dryden. The music to the first ode, says Scott, was first written by Percival Clarke, who killed himself in a fit of lovers' melancholy in 1707. It was then reset by Draghi, the Italian composer, and in 1711 was again set by Clayton for one of Sir Richard Steele's public concerts. The first ode (1687) contains those fine lines:--

"From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began; From harmony to harmony, Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man."

Of the composition of this ode, for which Dryden received £40, and which was afterwards eclipsed by the glories of its successor, the following interesting anecdote is told:--

"Mr. St. John, afterwards Lord Bolingbroke, happening to pay a morning visit to Dryden, whom he always respected, found him in an unusual agitation of spirits, even to a trembling. On inquiring the cause, 'I have been up all night,' replied the old bard. 'My musical friends made me promise to write them an ode for their feast of St. Cecilia. I have been so struck with the subject which occurred to me, that I could not leave it till I had completed it. Here it is, finished at one sitting.' And immediately he showed him the ode."

Dryden's second ode, "Alexander's Feast; or, the Power of Music," was written for the St. Cecilian Feast at Stationers' Hall in 1697. This ode ends with those fine and often-quoted lines on the fair saint:--

"Let old Timotheus yield the prize, Or both divide the crown; He raised a mortal to the skies, She drew an angel down."

Handel, in 1736, set this ode, and reproduced it at Covent Garden, with deserved success. Not often do such a poet and such a musician meet at the same anvil. The great German also set the former ode, which is known as "The Ode on St. Cecilia's Day." Dryden himself told Tonson that he thought with the town that this ode was the best of all his poetry; and he said to a young flatterer at Will's, with honest pride--"You are right, young gentleman; a nobler never was produced, nor ever will."

Many magnificent funerals have been marshalled in the Stationers' Hall; it has also been used for several great political banquets. In September, 1831, the Reform members of the House of Commons gave a dinner to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Lord Althorp) and to Lord John Russell--Mr. Abercromby (afterwards Speaker) presiding. In May, 1842, the Duke of Wellington presided over a dinner for the Infant Orphan Asylum, and in June, 1847, a dinner for the King's College Hospital was given under Sir Robert Peel's presidency. In the great kitchen below the hall, Mr. Nichols, who is an honorary member of the Company, says there have been sometimes seen at the same time as many as eighteen haunches of venison, besides a dozen necks and other joints; for these companies are as hospitable as they are rich.

The funeral feast of Thomas Sutton, of the Charterhouse, was given May 28th, 1612, in Stationers' Hall, the procession having started from Doctor Law's, in Paternoster Row. For the repast were provided "32 neats' tongues, 40 stone of beef, 24 marrow-bones, 1 lamb, 46 capons, 32 geese, 4 pheasants, 12 pheasants' pullets, 12 godwits, 24 rabbits, 6 hearnshaws, 43 turkey-chickens, 48 roast chickens, 18 house pigeons, 72 field pigeons, 36 quails, 48 ducklings, 160 eggs, 3 salmon, 4 congers, 10 turbots, 2 dories, 24 lobsters, 4 mullets, a firkin and keg of sturgeon, 3 barrels of pickled oysters, 6 gammon of bacon, 4 Westphalia gammons, 16 fried tongues, 16 chicken pies, 16 pasties, 16 made dishes of rice, 16 neats'-tongue pies, 16 custards, 16 dishes of bait, 16 mince pies, 16 orange pies, 16 gooseberry tarts, 8 redcare pies, 6 dishes of whitebait, and 6 grand salads."

To the west of the hall is the handsome court-room, where the meetings of the Company are held. The wainscoting, &c., were renewed in the year 1757, and an octagonal card-room was added by Mr. Mylne in 1828. On the opposite side of the hall is the stock-room, adorned by beautiful carvings of the school of Grinling Gibbons. Here the commercial committees of the Company usually meet.

The nine painted storeys which stood in the old hall, above the wainscot in the council parlour, probably crackled to dust in the Great Fire, which also rolled up and took away the portraits of John Cawood, printer to Philip and Mary, and his master, John Raynes. This same John Cawood seems to have been specially munificent in his donations to the Company, for he gave two new stained-glass windows to the hall; also a hearse-cover, of cloth and gold, powdered with blue velvet and bordered with black velvet, embroidered and stained with blue, yellow, red, and green, besides considerable plate.

The Company's curious collection of plate is carefully described by Mr. Nichols. In 1581 it seems every master on quitting the chair was required to give a piece of plate, weighing fourteen ounces at least; and every upper or under warden a piece of plate of at least three ounces. In this accumulative manner the Worshipful Company soon became possessed of a glittering store of "salts," gilt bowls, college pots, snuffers, cups, and flagons. Their greatest trophy seems to have been a large silver-gilt bowl, given in 1626 by a Mr. Hulet (Owlett), weighing sixty ounces, and shaped like an owl, in allusion to the donor's name. In the early Civil War, when the Company had to pledge their plate to meet the heavy loans exacted by Charles the Martyr from a good many of his unfortunate subjects, the cherished Owlett was specially excepted. Among other memorials in the possession of the Company was a silver college cup bought in memory of Mr. John Sweeting, who, dying in 1659 (the year before the Restoration), founded by will the pleasant annual venison dinner of the Company in August.

It is supposed that all the great cupboards of plate were lost in the fire of 1666, for there is no piece now existing (says Mr. Nichols) of an earlier date than 1676. It has been the custom also from time to time to melt down obsolete plate into newer forms and more useful vessels. Thus salvers and salt-cellars were in 1720-21 turned into monteaths, or bowls, filled with water, to keep the wine-glasses cool; and in 1844 a handsome rosewater dish was made out of a silver bowl, and an old tea-urn and coffee-urn. This custom is rather too much like Saturn devouring his own children, and has led to the destruction of many curious old relics. The massive old plate now remaining is chiefly of the reign of Charles II. High among these presents tower the quaint silver candlesticks bequeathed by Mr. Richard Royston, twice Master of the Stationers' Company, who died in 1686, and had been bookseller to three kings--James I., Charles I., and Charles II. The ponderous snuffers and snuffer-box are gone. There were also three other pairs of candlesticks, given by Mr. Nathanael Cole, who had been clerk of the Company, at his death in 1760. A small two-handled cup was bequeathed in 1771 by that worthy old printer, William Bowyer, as a memorial of the Company's munificence to his father after his loss by fire in 1712-13.

The Stationers are very charitable. Their funds spring chiefly from £1,150 bequeathed to them by Mr. John Norton, the printer to the learned Queen Elizabeth in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, alderman of London in the reign of James I., and thrice Master of this Company. The money laid out by Norton's wish in the purchase of estates in fee-simple in Wood Street has grown and grown. One hundred and fifty pounds out of this bequest the old printer left to the minister and churchwardens of St. Faith, in order to have distributed weekly to twelve poor persons--six appointed by the parish, and six by the Stationers' Company--twopence each and a penny loaf, the vantage loaf (the thirteenth allowed by the baker) to be the clerk's; ten shillings to be paid for an annual sermon on Ash Wednesday at St. Faith's; the residue to be laid out in cakes, wine, and ale for the Company of Stationers, either before or after the sermon. The liverymen still (according to Mr. Nichols) enjoy this annual dole of well-spiced and substantial buns. The sum of £1,000 was left for the generous purpose of advancing small loans to struggling young men in business. In 1861, however, the Company, under the direction of the Court of Chancery, devoted the sum to the founding of a commercial school in Bolt Court for the sons of liverymen and freemen of the Company, and £8,500 were spent in purchasing Mr. Bensley's premises and Dr. Johnson's old house. The doctor's usual sitting-room is now occupied by the head master. The school itself is built on the site formerly occupied by Johnson's garden. The boys pay a quarterage not exceeding £2. The school has four exhibitions.

The pictures at Stationers' Hall are worthy of mention. In the stock-room are portraits, after Kneller, of Prior and Steele, which formerly belonged to Harley, Earl of Oxford, Swift's great patron. The best picture in the room is a portrait by an unknown painter of Tycho Wing, the astronomer, holding a celestial globe. Tycho was the son of Vincent Wing, the first author of the almanacks still published under his name, and who died in 1668. There are also portraits of that worthy old printer, Samuel Richardson and his wife; Archbishop Tillotson, by Kneller; Bishop Hoadley, prelate of the Order of the Garter; Robert Nelson, the author of the "Fasts and Festivals," who died in 1714-15, by Kneller; and one of William Bowyer, the Whitefriars printer, with a posthumous bust beneath it of his son, the printer of the votes of the House of Commons. There was formerly a brass plate beneath this bust expressing the son's gratitude to the Company for their munificence to his father after the fire which destroyed his printing-office.

In the court-room hangs a portrait of John Boydell, who was Lord Mayor of London in the year 1791. This picture, by Graham, was formerly surrounded by allegorical figures of Justice, Prudence, Industry, and Commerce; but they have been cut out to reduce the canvas to Kit-cat size. There is a portrait, by Owen, of Lord Mayor Domville, Master of the Stationers' Company, in the actual robe he wore when he rode before the Prince Regent and the Allies in 1814 to the Guildhall banquet and the Peace thanksgiving. In the card-room is an early picture, by West, of King Alfred dividing his loaf with the pilgrim--a representation, by the way, of a purely imaginary occurrence--in fact, the old legend is that it was really St. Cuthbert who executed this generous partition. There are also portraits of the two Strahans, Masters in 1774 and 1816; one of Alderman Cadell, Master in 1798, by Sir William Beechey; and one of John Nicholls, Master of the Company in 1804, after a portrait by Jackson. In the hall, over the gallery, is a picture, by Graham, of Mary Queen of Scots escaping from the Castle of Lochleven. It was engraved by Dawe, afterwards a Royal Academician, when he was only fourteen years of age.

The arms of the Company appear from a Herald visitation of 1634 to have been azure on a chevron, an eagle volant, with a diadem between two red roses, with leaves vert, between three books clasped gold; in chief, issuing out of a cloud, the sunbeams gold, a holy spirit, the wings displayed silver, with a diadem gold. In later times the books have been blazoned as Bibles. In a "tricking" in the volume before mentioned, in the College of Arms, St. John the Evangelist stands behind the shield in the attitude of benediction, and bearing in his left hand a cross with a serpent rising from it (much more suitable for the scriveners or law writers, by the bye). On one side of the shield stands the Evangelist's emblematic eagle, holding an inkhorn in his beak. The Company never received any grant of arms or supporters, but about the year 1790 two angels seem to have been used as supporters. About 1788 the motto "Verbum Domini manet in eternum" (The word of the Lord endureth for ever) began to be adopted, and in the same year the crest of an eagle was used. On the silver badge of the Company's porter the supporters are naked winged boys, and the eagle on the chevron is turned into a dove holding an olive-branch. Some of the buildings of the present hall are still let to Paternoster Row booksellers as warehouses.

The list of masters of this Company includes Sir John Key, Bart. ("Don Key"), Lord Mayor in 1831-1832. In 1712 Thomas Parkhurst, who had been Master of the Worshipful Company in 1683, left £37 to purchase Bibles and Psalters, to be annually given to the poor; hence the old custom of giving Bibles to apprentices bound at Stationers' Hall.

This is the first of the many City companies of which we shall have by turns to make mention in the course of this work. Though no longer useful as a guild to protect a trade which now needs no fostering, we have seen that it still retains some of its mediæval virtues. It is hospitable and charitable as ever, if not so given to grand funeral services and ecclesiastical ceremonials. Its privileges have grown out of date and obsolete, but they harm no one but authors, and to the wrongs of authors both Governments and Parliaments have been from time immemorial systematically indifferent.

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XX. ST. PAUL'S

London's chief Sanctuary of Religion--The Site of St. Paul's--The Earliest authenticated Church there--The Shrine of Erkenwald--St. Paul's Burnt and Rebuilt--It becomes the Scene of a Strange Incident--Important Political Meeting within its Walls--The Great Charter published there--St. Paul's and Papal Power in England--Turmoils around the Grand Cathedral--Relics and Chantry Chapels in St. Paul's--Royal Visits to St. Paul's--Richard, Duke of York, and Henry VI.--A Fruitless Reconciliation--Jane Shore's Penance--A Tragedy of the Lollards' Tower--A Royal Marriage--Henry VIII. and Cardinal Wolsey at St. Paul's--"Peter of Westminster"--A Bonfire of Bibles--The Cathedral Clergy Fined--A Miraculous Rood--St. Paul's under Edward VI. and Bishop Ridley--A Protestant Tumult at Paul's Cross--Strange Ceremonials--Queen Elizabeth's Munificence--The Burning of the Spire--Desecration of the Nave--Elizabeth and Dean Nowell--Thanksgiving for the Armada--The "Children of Paul's"--Government Lotteries--Executions in the Churchyard--Inigo Jones's Restorations and the Puritan Parliament--The Great Fire of 1666--Burning of Old St. Paul's, and Destruction of its Monuments--Evelyn's Description of the Fire--Sir Christopher Wren called in.

Stooping under the flat iron bar that lies like a bone in the mouth of Ludgate Hill, we pass up the gentle ascent between shops hung with gold chains, brimming with wealth, or crowded with all the luxuries that civilisation has turned into necessities; and once past the impertinent black spire of St. Martin's, we come full-butt upon the great grey dome. The finest building in London, with the worst approach; the shrine of heroes; the model of grace; the chef-d'oeuvre of a great genius, rises before us, and between its sable Corinthian pillars we have now to thread our way in search of the old legends of St. Paul's.

The old associations rise around us as we pass across the paved area that surrounds Queen Anne's mean and sooty statue. From the times of the Saxons to the present day, London's chief sanctuary of religion has stood here above the river, a landmark to the ships of all nations that have floated on the welcoming waters of the Thames. That great dome, circled with its coronet of gold, is the first object the pilgrim traveller sees, whether he approach by river or by land; the sparkle of that golden cross is seen from many a distant hill and plain. St. Paul's is the central object--the very palladium--of modern London.

Camden, the Elizabethan historian, revived an old tradition that a Roman temple to Diana once stood where St. Paul's was afterwards built; and he asserts that in the reign of Edward III. an incredible quantity of ox-skulls, stag-horns, and boars' tusks, together with some sacrificial vessels, were exhumed on this site. Selden, a better Orientalist than Celtic scholar (Charles I.), derived the name of London from two Welsh words, "Llan-den"--church of Diana. Dugdale, to confirm these traditions, drags a legend out of an obscure monkish chronicle, to the effect that during the Diocletian persecution, in which St. Alban, a centurion, was martyred, the Romans demolished a church standing on the site of St. Paul's, and raised a temple to Diana on its ruins, while in Thorny Island, Westminster, St. Peter, in the like manner, gave way to Apollo. These myths are, however, more than doubtful.

Sir Christopher Wren's excavations for the foundation of modern St. Paul's entirely refuted these confused stories, to which the learned and the credulous had paid too much deference. He dug down to the river-level, and found neither ox-bone nor stag-horn. What he did find, however, was curious. It was this:--1. Below the mediæval graves Saxon stone coffins and Saxon tombs, lined with slabs of chalk. 2. Lower still, British graves, and in the earth around the ivory and boxwood skewers that had fastened the Saxons' woollen shrouds. 3. At the same level with the Saxon graves, and also deeper, Roman funeral urns. These were discovered as deep as eighteen feet. Roman lamps, tear vessels, and fragments of sacrificial vessels of Samian ware were met with chiefly towards the Cheapside corner of the churchyard.

There had evidently been a Roman cemetery outside this Prætorian camp, and beyond the ancient walls of London, the wise nation, by the laws of the Twelve Tables, forbidding the interment of the dead within the walls of a city. There may have been a British or a Saxon temple here; for the Church tried hard to conquer and consecrate places where idolatry had once triumphed. But the Temple of Diana was moonshine from the beginning, and moonshine it will ever remain. The antiquaries were, however, angry with Wren for the logical refutation of their belief. Dr. Woodward (the "Martinus Scriblerus" of Pope and his set) was especially vehement at the slaying of his hobby, and produced a small brass votive image of Diana, that had been found between the Deanery and Blackfriars. Wren, who could be contemptuous, disdained a reply, and so the matter remained till 1830, when the discovery of a rude stone altar, with an image of Diana, under the foundation of the new Goldsmith's Hall, Foster Lane, Cheapside, revived the old dispute, yet did not help a whit to prove the existence of the supposed temple to the goddess of moonshine.

The earliest authenticated church of St. Paul's was built and endowed by Ethelbert, King of East Kent, with the sanction of Sebert, King of the East Angles; and the first bishop who preached within its walls was Mellitus, the companion of St. Augustine, the first Christian missionary who visited the heathen Saxons. The visit of St. Paul to England in the time of Boadicea's war, and that of Joseph of Arimathea, are mere monkish legends. The Londoners again became pagan, and for thirty-eight years there was no bishop at St. Paul's, till a brother of St. Chad of Lichfield came and set his foot on the images of Thor and Wodin. With the fourth successor of Mellitus, Saint Erkenwald, wealth and splendour returned to St. Paul's. This zealous man worked miracles both before and after his death. He used to be driven about in a cart, and one legend says that he often preached to the woodmen in the wild forests that lay to the north of London. On a certain day one of the cart-wheels came off in a slough. The worthy confessor was in a dilemma. The congregation under the oaks might have waited for ever, but the one wheel left was equal to the occasion, for it suddenly grew invested with special powers of balancing, and went on as steadily as a velocipede with the smiling saint. This was pretty well, but still nothing to what happened after the good man's death.

St. Erkenwald departed at last in the odour of sanctity at his sister's convent at Barking. Eager to get hold of so valuable a body, the Chertsey monks instantly made a dash for it, pursued by the equally eager clergy of St. Paul's, who were fully alive to the value of their dead bishop, whose shrine would become a money-box for pilgrim's offerings. The London priests, by a forced march, got first to Barking and bore off the body; but the monks of Chertsey and the nuns of Barking followed, wringing their hands and loudly protesting against the theft. The river Lea, sympathising with their prayers, rose in a flood. There was no boat, no bridge, and a fight for the body seemed imminent. A pious man present, however, exhorted the monks to peace, and begged them to leave the matter to heavenly decision. The clergy of St. Paul's then broke forth into a litany. The Lea at once subsided, the cavalcade crossed at Stratford, the sun cast down its benediction, and the clergy passed on to St. Paul's with their holy spoil. From that time the shrine of Erkenwald became a source of wealth and power to the cathedral.

The Saxon kings, according to Dean Milman, were munificent to St. Paul's. The clergy claimed Tillingham, in Essex, as a grant from King Ethelbert, and that place still contributes to the maintenance of the cathedral. The charters of Athelstane are questionable, but the places mentioned in them certainly belonged to St. Paul's till the Ecclesiastical Commissioners broke in upon that wealth; and the charter of Canute, still preserved, and no doubt authentic, ratifies the donations of his Saxon predecessors.

William the Conqueror's Norman Bishop of London was a good, peace-loving man, who interceded with the stern monarch, and recovered the forfeited privileges of the refractory London citizens. For centuries--indeed, even up to the end of Queen Mary's reign--the mayor, aldermen, and crafts used to make an annual procession to St. Paul's, to visit the tomb of good Bishop William in the nave. In 1622 the Lord Mayor, Edward Barkham, caused these quaint lines to be carved on the bishop's tomb:--

"Walkers, whosoe'er ye bee, If it prove you chance to see, Upon a solemn scarlet day, The City senate pass this way, Their grateful memory for to show, Which they the reverent ashes owe Of Bishop Norman here inhumed, By whom this city has assumed Large privileges; those obtained By him when Conqueror William reigned. This being by Barkham's thankful mind renewed, Call it the monument of gratitude."

The ruthless Conqueror granted valuable privileges to St. Paul's. He freed the church from the payment of Danegeld, and all services to the Crown. His words (if they are authentic) are--"Some lands I give to God and the church of St. Paul's, in London, and special franchises, because I wish that this church may be free in all things, as I wish my soul to be on the day of judgment." In this same reign the Primate Lanfranc held a great council at St. Paul's--a council which Milman calls "the first full Ecclesiastical Parliament of England." Twelve years after (1087), the year the Conqueror died, fire, that persistent enemy of St. Paul's, almost entirely consumed the cathedral.

Bishop Maurice set to work to erect a more splendid building, with a vast crypt, in which the valuable remains of St. Erkenwald were enshrined. William of Malmesbury ranked it among the great buildings of his time. One of the last acts of the Conqueror was to give the stone of a Palatine tower (on the subsequent site of Blackfriars) for the building. The next bishop, De Balmeis, is said to have devoted the whole of his revenues for twenty years to this pious work. Fierce Rufus--no friend of monks--did little; but the milder monarch, Henry I., granted exemption of toll to all vessels, laden with stone for St. Paul's, that entered the Fleet.

To enlarge the area of the church, King Henry gave part of the Palatine Tower estate, which was turned into a churchyard and encircled with a wall, which ran along Carter Lane to Creed Lane, and was freed of buildings. The bishop, on his part, contributed to the service of the altar the rents of Paul's Wharf, and for a school gave the house of Durandus, at the corner of Bell Court. On the bishop's death, the Crown seized his wealth, and the bishop's boots were carried to the Exchequer full of gold and silver. St. Bernard, however, praises him, and says: "It was not wonderful that Master Gilbert should be a bishop; but that the Bishop of London should live like a poor man, that was magnificent."

In the reign of Stephen a dreadful fire broke out and raged from London Bridge to St. Clement Danes. In this fire St. Paul's was partially destroyed. The Bishop, in his appeals for contributions to the church, pleaded that this was the only London church specially dedicated to St. Paul. The citizens of London were staunch advocates of King Stephen against the Empress Maud, and at their folkmote, held at the Cheapside end of St. Paul's, claimed the privilege of naming a monarch.

In the reign of Henry II. St. Paul's was the scene of a strange incident connected with the quarrel between the King and that ambitious Churchman, the Primate Becket. Gilbert Foliot, the learned and austere Bishop of London, had sided with the King and provoked the bitter hatred of Becket. During the celebration of mass a daring emissary of Becket had the boldness to thrust a roll, bearing the dreaded sentence of excommunication against Foliot, into the hands of the officiating priest, and at the same time to cry aloud--"Know all men that Gilbert, Bishop of London, is excommunicated by Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury!" Foliot for a time defied the interdict, but at last bowed to his enemy's authority, and refrained from entering the Church of St. Paul's.

The reign of Richard I. was an eventful one to St. Paul's. In 1191, when Coeur de Lion was in Palestine, Prince John and all the bishops met in the nave of St. Paul's to arraign William de Longchamp, one of the King's regents, of many acts of tyranny. In the reign of their absentee monarch the Londoners grew mutinous, and their leader, William Fitzosbert, or Longbeard, denounced their oppressors from Paul's Cross. These disturbances ended in the siege of Bow Church, where Fitzosbert had fortified himself, and by the burning alive of him and other ringleaders. It was at this period that Dean Radulph de Diceto, a monkish chronicler of learning, built the Deanery, "inhabited," says Milman, "after him, by many men of letters;" before the Reformation, by the admirable Colet; after the Reformation by Alexander Nowell, Donne, Sancroft (who rebuilt the mansion after the Great Fire), Stillingfleet, Tillotson, W. Sherlock, Butler, Secker, Newton, Van Mildert, Copleston, and Milman.

St. Paul's was also the scene of one of those great meetings of prelates, abbots, deans, priors, and barons that finally led to King John's concession of Magna Charta. On this solemn occasion--so important for the progress of England--the Primate Langton displayed the old charter of Henry I. to the chief barons, and made them sacredly pledge themselves to stand up for Magna Charta and the liberties of England.

One of the first acts of King Henry III. was to hold a council in St. Paul's, and there publish the Great Charter. Twelve years after, when a Papal Legate enthroned himself in St. Paul's, he was there openly resisted by Cantelupe, Bishop of Worcester.

Papal power in this reign attained its greatest height in England. On the death of Bishop Roger, an opponent of these inroads, the King gave orders that out of the episcopal revenue 1,500 poor should be feasted on the day of the conversion of St. Paul, and 1,500 lights offered in the church. The country was filled with Italian prelates. An Italian Archbishop of Canterbury, coming to St. Paul's, with a cuirass under his robes, to demand first-fruits from the Bishop, found the doors closed in his face; and two canons of the Papal party, endeavouring to install themselves at St. Paul's, were in 1259 killed by the angry populace.

In the reign of this weak king several folkmotes of the London citizens were held at Paul's Cross, in the churchyard. On one occasion the king himself, and his brother, the King of Almayne, were present. All citizens, even to the age of twelve, were sworn to allegiance, for a great outbreak for liberty was then imminent. The inventory of the goods of Bishop Richard de Gravesend, Bishop of London for twenty-five years of this reign, is still preserved in the archives of St. Paul's. It is a roll twenty-eight feet long. The value of the whole property was nearly £3,000, and this sum (says Milman) must be multiplied by about fifteen to bring it to its present value.

When the citizens of London justly ranged themselves on the side of Simon de Montfort, who stood up for their liberties, the great bell of St. Paul's was the tocsin that summoned the burghers to arms, especially on that memorable occasion when Queen Eleanor tried to escape by water from the Tower to Windsor, where her husband was, and the people who detested her tried to sink her barge as it passed London Bridge.

In the equally troublous reign of Edward II. St. Paul's was again splashed with blood. The citizens, detesting the king's foreign favourites, rose against the Bishop of Exeter, Edward's regent in London. A letter from the queen, appealing to them, was affixed to the cross in Cheapside. The bishop demanded the City keys of the Lord Mayor, and the people sprang to arms, with cries of "Death to the queen's enemies!" They cut off the head of a servant of the De Spensers, burst open the gates of the Bishop of Exeter's palace (Essex Street, Strand), and plundered, sacked, and destroyed everything. The bishop, at the time riding in the Islington fields, hearing the danger, dashed home, and made straight for sanctuary in St. Paul's. At the north door, however, the mob thickening, tore him from his horse, and, hurrying him into Cheapside, proclaimed him a traitor, and beheaded him there, with two of his servants. They then dragged his body back to his palace, and flung the corpse into the river.

In the inglorious close of the glorious reign of Edward III., Courtenay, Bishop of London, an inflexible prelate, did his best to induce some of the London rabble to plunder the Florentines, at that time the great bankers and money-lenders of the metropolis, by reading at Paul's Cross the interdict Gregory XI. had launched against them; but on this occasion the Lord Mayor, leading the principal Florentine merchants into the presence of the aged king, obtained the royal protection for them.

Wycliffe and his adherents (amongst whom figured John of Gaunt--"old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster"--Chaucer's patron) soon brewed more trouble in St. Paul's for the proud bishop. The great reformer being summoned to an ecclesiastical council at St. Paul's, was accompanied by his friends, John of Gaunt and the Earl Marshal, Lord Percy. When in the lady chapel Percy demanded a soft seat for Wycliffe. The bishop said it was law and reason that a cited man should stand before the ordinary. Angry words ensued, and the Duke of Lancaster taunted Courtenay with his pride. The bishop answered, "I trust not in man, but in God alone, who will give me boldness to speak the truth." A rumour was spread that John of Gaunt had threatened to drag the bishop out of the church by the hair, and that he had vowed to abolish the title of Lord Mayor. A tumult began. All through the City the billmen and bowmen gathered. The Savoy, John of Gaunt's palace, would have been burned but for the intercession of the bishop. A priest mistaken for Percy was murdered. The duke fled to Kensington, and joined the Princess of Wales.

Richard II., that dissolute, rash, and unfortunate monarch, once only (alive) came to St. Paul's in great pomp, his robes hung with bells, and afterwards feasted at the house of his favourite, Sir Nicholas Brember, who was eventually put to death. The Lollards were now making way, and Archbishop Courtenay had a great barefooted procession to St. Paul's to hear a famous Carmelite preacher inveigh against the Wycliffe doctrines. A Lollard, indeed, had the courage to nail to the doors of St. Paul's twelve articles of the new creed denouncing the mischievous celibacy of the clergy, transubstantiation, prayers for the dead, pilgrimages, and other mistaken and idolatrous usages. When Henry Bolingbroke (not yet crowned Henry IV.) came to St. Paul's to offer prayer for the dethronement of his ill-fated cousin, Richard, he paused at the north side of the altar to shed tears over the grave of his father, John of Gaunt, interred early that very year in the Cathedral. Not long after the shrunken body of the dead king, on its way to the Abbey, was exposed in St. Paul's, to prove to the populace that Richard was not still alive. Hardynge, in his chronicles (quoted by Milman), says that the usurping king and his nobles spread--some seven, some nine--cloths of gold on the bier of the murdered king.

Bishop Braybroke, in the reign of Edward IV., was strenuous in denouncing ecclesiastical abuses. Edward III. himself had denounced the resort of mechanics to the refectory, the personal vices of the priests, and the pilfering of sacred vessels. He restored the communion-table, and insisted on daily alms-giving. But Braybroke also condemned worse abuses. He issued a prohibition at Paul's Cross against barbers shaving on Sundays; he forbade the buying and selling in the Cathedral, the flinging stones and shooting arrows at the pigeons and jackdaws nestling in the walls of the church, and the playing at ball, both within and without the church, a practice which led to the breaking of many beautiful and costly painted windows.

But here we stop awhile in our history of St. Paul's, on the eve of the sanguinary wars of the Roses, to describe mediæval St. Paul's, its structure, and internal government. Foremost among the relics were two arms of St. Mellitus (miraculously enough, of quite different sizes). Behind the high altar--what Dean Milman justly calls "the pride, glory, and fountain of wealth" to St. Paul's--was the body of St. Erkenwald, covered with a shrine which three London goldsmiths had spent a whole year in chiselling; and this shrine was covered with a grate of tinned iron. The very dust of the chapel floor, mingled with water, was said to work instantaneous cures. On the anniversary of St. Erkenwald the whole clergy of the diocese attended in procession in their copes. When King John of France was made captive at Poictiers, and paid his orisons at St. Paul's, he presented four golden basins to the high altar, and twenty-two nobles at the shrine of St. Erkenwald. Milman calculates that in 1344 the oblation-box alone at St. Paul's produced an annual sum to the dean and chapter of £9,000. Among other relics that were milch cows to the monks were a knife of our Lord, some hair of Mary Magdalen, blood of St. Paul, milk of the Virgin, the hand of St. John, pieces of the mischievous skull of Thomas à Becket, and the head and jaw of King Ethelbert. These were all preserved in jewelled cases. One hundred and eleven anniversary masses were celebrated. The chantry chapels in the Cathedral were very numerous, and they were served by an army of idle and often dissolute mass priests. There was one chantry in Pardon Churchyard, on the north side of St. Paul's, east of the bishop's chapel, where St. Thomas Becket's ancestors were buried. The grandest was one near the nave, built by Bishop Kemp, to pray for himself and his royal master, Edward IV. Another was founded by Henry IV. for the souls of his father, John of Gaunt, and his mother, Blanche of Castile. A third was built by Lord Mayor Pulteney, who was buried in St. Lawrence Pulteney, so called from him. The revenues of these chantries were vast.

But to return to our historical sequence. During the ruthless Wars of the Roses St. Paul's became the scene of many curious ceremonials, on which Shakespeare himself has touched, in his early historical plays. It was on a platform at the cathedral door that Roger Bolingbroke, the spurious necromancer who was supposed to have aided the ambitious designs of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, was exhibited. The Duchess's penance for the same offence, according to Milman's opinion, commenced or closed near the cathedral, in that shameful journey when she was led through the streets wrapped in a sheet, and carrying a lighted taper in her hand. The duke, her husband, was eventually buried at St. Paul's, where his tomb became the haunt of needy men about town, whence the well-known proverb of "dining with Duke Humphrey."

Henry VI.'s first peaceful visit to St. Paul's is quaintly sketched by that dull old poet, Lydgate, who describes "the bishops in pontificalibus, the Dean of Paules and canons, every one who conveyed the king"

"Up into the church, with full devout singing; And when he had made his offering, The mayor, the citizens, bowed and left him."

While all the dark troubles still were pending, we find the Duke of York taking a solemn oath on the host of fealty to King Henry. Six years later, after the battle of St. Albans, the Yorkists and Lancastrians met again at the altar of St. Paul's in feigned unity. The poor weak monarch was crowned, and had sceptre in hand, and his proud brilliant queen followed him in smiling converse with the Duke of York. Again the city poet broke into rejoicing at the final peace:--

"At Paul's in London, with great renown, On Lady Day in Lent, this peace was wrought; The King, the Queen, with lords many an one, To worship the Virgin as they ought, Went in procession, and spared right nought In sight of all the commonalty; In token this love was in heart and thought, Rejoice England in concord and unity."

Alas for such reconciliations! Four years later more blood had been shed, more battle-fields strewn with dead. The king was a captive, had disinherited his own son, and granted the succession to the Duke of York, whose right a Parliament had acknowledged. His proud queen was in the North rallying the scattered Lancastrians. York and Warwick, Henry's deadly enemies, knelt before the primate, and swore allegiance to the king; and the duke's two sons, March and Rutland, took the same oath.

Within a few months Wakefield was fought; Richard was slain, and the duke's head, adorned with a mocking paper crown, was sent, by the she-wolf of a queen, to adorn the walls of York.

The next year, however, fortune forsook Henry for ever, and St. Paul's welcomed Edward IV. and the redoubtable "king-maker," who had won the crown for him at the battle of Mortimer's Cross; and no Lancastrian dared show his face on that triumphant day. Ten years later Warwick, veering to the downfallen king, was slain at Barnet, and the body of the old warrior, and that of his brother, were exposed, barefaced, for three days in St. Paul's, to the delight of all true Yorkists. Those were terrible times, and the generosity of the old chivalry seemed now despised and forgotten. The next month there was even a sadder sight, for the body of King Henry himself was displayed in the Cathedral. Broken-hearted, said the Yorkists, but the Lancastrian belief (favoured by Shakespeare) was that Richard Duke of Gloucester, the wicked Crookback, stabbed him with his own hand in the Tower, and it was said that blood poured from the body when it lay in the Cathedral. Again St. Paul's was profaned at the death of Edward IV., when Richard came to pay his ostentatious orisons in the Cathedral, while he was already planning the removal of the princes to the Tower. Always anxious to please the London citizens, it was to St. Paul's Cross that Richard sent Dr. Shaw to accuse Clarence of illegitimacy. At St. Paul's, too, according to Shakespeare, who in his historic plays often follows traditions now forgotten, or chronicles that have perished, the charges against Hastings were publicly read. Jane Shore, the mistress, and supposed accomplice of Hastings in bewitching Richard, did penance in St. Paul's. She was the wife of a London goldsmith, and had been mistress of Edward IV. Her beauty, as she walked downcast with shame, is said to have moved every heart to pity. On his accession, King Richard, nervously fingering his dagger, as was his wont to do according to the chronicles, rode to St. Paul's, and was received by procession, amid great congratulation and acclamation from the fickle people. Kemp, who was the Yorkist bishop during all these dreadful times, rebuilt St. Paul's Cross, which then became one of the chief ornaments of London.

Richard's crown was presently beaten into a hawthorn bush on Bosworth Field, and his defaced, mangled, and ill-shaped body thrown, like carrion, across a pack-horse and driven off to Leicester, and Henry VII., the astute, the wily, the thrifty, reigned in his stead. After Henry's victory over Simnel he came two successive days to St. Paul's to offer his thanksgiving, and Simnel (afterwards a scullion in the royal kitchen) rode humbly at his conqueror's side.

The last ceremonial of the reign of Henry VII. that took place at St. Paul's was the ill-fated marriage of Prince Arthur (a mere boy, who died six months after) with Katherine of Arragon. The whole church was hung with tapestry, and there was a huge scaffold, with seats round it, reaching from the west door to the choir. On this platform the ceremony was performed. All day, at several places in the city, and at the west door of the Cathedral, the conduits ran for the delighted people with red and white wine. The wedded children were lodged in the bishop's palace, and three days later returned by water to Westminster. When Henry VII. died, his body lay in state in St. Paul's, and from thence it was taken to Windsor, to remain there till the beautiful chapel he had endowed at Westminster was ready for his reception. The Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's were among the trustees for the endowment he left, and the Cathedral still possesses the royal testament.

A Venetian ambassador who was present has left a graphic description of one of the earliest ceremonies (1514) which Henry VIII. witnessed at St. Paul's. The Pope (Leo X.) had sent the young and chivalrous king a sword and cap of maintenance, as a special mark of honour. The cap was of purple satin, covered with embroidery and pearls, and decked with ermine. The king rode from the bishop's palace to the cathedral on a beautiful black palfrey, the nobility walking before him in pairs. At the high altar the king donned the cap, and was girt with the sword. The procession then made the entire circuit of the church. The king wore a gown of purple satin and gold in chequer, and a jewelled collar; his cap of purple velvet had two jewelled rosettes, and his doublet was of gold brocade. The nobles wore massive chains of gold, and their chequered silk gowns were lined with sables, lynx-fur, and swansdown.

In the same reign Richard Fitz James, the fanatical Bishop of London, persecuted the Lollards, and burned two of the most obstinate at Smithfield. It is indeed, doubtful, even now, if Fitz James, in his hatred of the reformers, stopped short of murder. In 1514, Richard Hunn, a citizen who had disputed the jurisdiction of the obnoxious Ecclesiastical Court, was thrown into the Lollard's Tower (the bishop's prison, at the south-west corner of the Cathedral). A Wycliffe Bible had been found in his house; he was adjudged a heretic, and one night this obstinate man was found hung in his cell. The clergy called it suicide, but the coroner brought in a verdict of wilful murder against the Bishop's Chancellor, the sumner, and the bell-ringer of the Cathedral. The king, however, pardoned them all on their paying £1,500 to Hunn's family. The bishop, still furious, burned Hunn's body sixteen days after, as that of a heretic, in Smithfield. This fanatical bishop was the ceaseless persecutor of Dean Colet, that excellent and enlightened man, who founded St. Paul's School, and was the untiring friend of Erasmus, whom he accompanied on his memorable visit to Becket's shrine at Canterbury.

In 1518 Wolsey, proud and portly, appears upon the scene, coming to St. Paul's to sing mass and celebrate eternal peace between France, England, and Spain, and the betrothal of the beautiful Princess Mary to the Dauphin of France. The large chapel and the choir were hung with gold brocade, blazoned with the king's arms. Near the altar was the king's pew, formed of cloth of gold, and in front of it a small altar covered with silver-gilt images, with a gold cross in the centre. Two low masses were said at this before the king, while high mass was being sung to the rest. On the opposite side of the altar, on a raised and canopied chair, sat Wolsey; further off stood the legate Campeggio. The twelve bishops and six abbots present all wore their jewelled mitres, while the king himself shone out in a tunic of purple velvet, "powdered" with pearls and rubies, sapphires and diamonds. His collar was studded with carbuncles as large as walnuts. A year later Charles V. was proclaimed emperor by the heralds at St. Paul's. Wolsey gave the benediction, no doubt with full hope of the Pope's tiara.

In 1521, but a little later, Wolsey, "Cardinal of St. Cecilia and Archbishop of York," was welcomed by Dean Pace to St. Paul's. He had come to sit near Paul's Cross, to hear Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, by the Pope's command, denounce "Martinus Eleutherius" and his accursed works, many of which were burned in the churchyard during the sermon, no doubt to the infinite alarm of all heretical booksellers in the neighbouring street. Wolsey had always an eye to the emperor's helping him to the papacy; and when Charles V. came to England to visit Henry, in 1522, Wolsey said mass, censed by more than twenty obsequious prelates. It was Wolsey who first, as papal legate, removed the convocation entirely from St. Paul's to Westminster, to be near his house at Whitehall. His ribald enemy, Skelton, then hiding from the cardinal's wrath in the Sanctuary at Westminster, wrote the following rough distich on the arbitrary removal:--

"Gentle Paul, lay down thy sword, For Peter of Westminster hath shaven thy beard."

On the startling news of the battle of Pavia, when Francis I. was taken prisoner by his great rival of Spain, a huge bonfire illumined the west front of St. Paul's, and hogsheads of claret were broached at the Cathedral door, to celebrate the welcome tidings. On the Sunday after, the bluff king, the queen, and both houses of Parliament, attended a solemn "Te Deum" at the cathedral; while on St. Matthew's Day there was a great procession of all the religious orders in London, and Wolsey, with his obsequious bishops, performed service at the high altar. Two years later Wolsey came again, to lament or rejoice over the sack of Rome by the Constable Bourbon, and the captivity of the Pope.

Singularly enough, the fire lighted by Wolsey in St. Paul's Churchyard had failed to totally burn up Luther and all his works; and on Shrove Tuesday, 1527, Wolsey made another attempt to reduce the new-formed Bible to ashes. In the great procession that came on this day to St. Paul's there were six Lutherans in penitential dresses, carrying terribly symbolical fagots and huge lighted tapers. On a platform in the nave sat the portly and proud cardinal, supported by thirty-six zealous bishops, abbots, and priests. At the foot of the great rood over the northern door the heretical tracts and Testaments were thrown into a fire. The prisoners, on their knees, begged pardon of God and the Catholic Church, and were then led three times round the fire, which they fed with the fagots they had carried.

Four years later, after Wolsey's fall, the London clergy were summoned to St. Paul's Chapter-house (near the south side). The king, offended at the Church having yielded to Wolsey's claims as a papal legate, by which the penalty of præmunire had been incurred, had demanded from it the alarming fine of £100,000. Immediately six hundred clergy of all ranks thronged riotously to the chapter-house, to resist this outrageous tax. The bishop was all for concession; their goods and lands were forfeit, their bodies liable to imprisonment. The humble clergy cried out, "We have never meddled in the cardinal's business. Let the bishops and abbots, who have offended, pay." Blows were struck, and eventually fifteen priests and four laymen were condemned to terms of imprisonment in the Fleet and Tower, for their resistance to despotic power.

In 1535 nineteen German Anabaptists were examined in St. Paul's, and fourteen of them sent to the stake. Then came plain signs that the Reformation had commenced. The Pope's authority had been denied at Paul's Cross in 1534. A miraculous rood from Kent was brought to St. Paul's, and the machinery that moved the eyes and lips was shown to the populace, after which it was thrown down and broken amid contemptuous laughter. Nor would this chapter be complete if we did not mention a great civic procession at the close of the reign of Henry VIII. On Whit Sunday, 1546, the children of Paul's School, with parsons and vicars of every London church, in their copes, went from St. Paul's to St. Peter's, Cornhill, Bishop Bonner bearing the sacrament under a canopy; and at the Cross, before the mayor, aldermen, and all the crafts, heralds proclaimed perpetual peace between England, France, and the Emperor. Two months after, the ex-bishop of Rochester preached a sermon at Paul's Cross recanting his heresy, four of his late fellow-prisoners in Newgate having obstinately perished at the stake.

In the reign of Edward VI. St. Paul's witnessed far different scenes. The year of the accession of the child-king, funeral service was read to the memory of Francis I., Latin dirges were chanted, and eight mitred bishops sang a requiem to the monarch lately deceased. At the coronation, while the guilds were marshalled along Cheapside, and tapestries hung from every window, an acrobat descended by a cable from St. Paul's steeple to the anchor of a ship near the Deanery door. In November of the next year, at night, the crucifixes and images in St. Paul's were pulled down and removed, to the horror of the faithful, and all obits and chantreys were confiscated, and the vestments and altar cloths were sold. The early reformers were backed by greedy partisans. The Protector Somerset, who was desirous of building rapidly a sumptuous palace in the Strand, pulled down the chapel and charnel-house in the Pardon churchyard, and carted off the stones of St. Paul's cloister. When the good Ridley was installed Bishop of London, he would not enter the choir until the lights on the altar were extinguished. Very soon a table was substituted for the altar, and there was an attempt made to remove the organ. The altar, and chapel, and tombs (all but John of Gaunt's) were then ruthlessly destroyed.

During the Lady Jane Grey rebellion, Ridley denounced Mary and Elizabeth as bastards. The accession of gloomy Queen Mary soon turned the tables. As the Queen passed to her coronation, a daring Dutchman stood on the cross of St. Paul's waving a long streamer, and shifting from foot to foot as he shook two torches which he held over his head.

But the citizens were Protestants at heart. At the first sermon preached at St. Paul's Cross, Dr. Bourne, a rash Essex clergyman, prayed for the dead, praised Bonner, and denounced Ridley. The mob, inflamed to madness, shouted, "He preaches damnation! Pull him down! pull him down!" A dagger, thrown at the preacher, stuck quivering in a side-post of the pulpit. With difficulty two good men dragged the rash zealot safely into St. Paul's School. For this riot several persons were sent to the Tower, and a priest and a barber had their ears nailed to the pillory at St. Paul's Cross. The crosses were raised again in St. Paul's, and the old ceremonies and superstitions revived. On St. Katherine's Day (in honour of the queen's mother's patron saint) there was a procession with lights, and the image of St. Katherine, round St. Paul's steeple, and the bells rang. Yet not long after this, when a Dr. Pendleton preached old doctrines at St. Paul's Cross, a gun was fired at him. When Bonner was released from the Marshalsea and restored to his see, the people shouted, "Welcome home;" and a woman ran forward and kissed him. We are told that he knelt in prayer on the Cathedral steps.

In 1554, at the reception in St. Paul's of Cardinal Pole, King Philip attended with English, Spanish, and German guards, and a great retinue of nobles. Bishop Gardiner preached on the widening heresy till the audience groaned and wept. Of the cruel persecutions of the Protestants in this reign St. Paul's was now and then a witness, and likewise of the preparations for the execution of Protestants, which Bonner's party called "trials." Thus we find Master Cardmaker, vicar of St. Bride's, and Warne, an upholsterer in Walbrook, both arraigned at St. Paul's before the bishop for heresy, and carried back from there to Newgate, to be shortly after burned alive in Smithfield.

In the midst of these horrors, a strange ceremony took place at St. Paul's, more worthy, indeed, of the supposititious temple of Diana than of a Christian cathedral, did it not remind us that Popery was always strangely intermingled with fragments of old paganism. In June, 1557 (St. Paul's Day, says Machyn, an undertaker and chronicler of Mary's reign), a fat buck was presented to the dean and chapter, according to an annual grant made by Sir Walter le Baud, an Essex knight, in the reign of Edward I. A priest from each London parish attended in his cope, and the Bishop of London wore his mitre, while behind the burly, bullying, persecutor Bonner came a fat buck, his head with his horns borne upon a pole; forty huntsmen's horns blowing a rejoicing chorus.

The last event of this blood-stained reign was the celebration at St. Paul's of the victory over the French at the battle of St. Quintin by Philip and the Spaniards. A sermon was preached to the city at Paul's Cross, bells were rung, and bonfires blazed in every street.

At Elizabeth's accession its new mistress soon purged St. Paul's of all its images: copes and shaven crowns disappeared. The first ceremony of the new reign was the performance of the obsequies of Henry II. of France. The empty hearse was hung with cloth of gold, the choir draped in black, the clergy appearing in plain black gowns and caps. And now, what the Catholics called a great judgment fell on the old Cathedral. During a great storm in 1561, St. Martin's Church, Ludgate, was struck by lightning; immediately after, the wooden steeple of St. Paul's started into a flame. The fire burned downwards furiously for four hours, the bells melted, the lead poured in torrents; the roof fell in, and the whole Cathedral became for a time a ruin. Soon after, at the Cross, Dean Nowell rebuked the Papists for crying out "a judgment." In papal times the church had also suffered. In Richard I.'s reign an earthquake shook down the spire, and in Stephen's time fire had also brought destruction. The Crown and City were roused by this misfortune. Thrifty Elizabeth gave 1,000 marks in gold, and 1,000 marks' worth of timber; the City gave a great benevolence, and the clergy subscribed £1,410. In one month a false roof was erected, and by the end of the year the aisles were leaded in. On the 1st of November, the same year, the mayor, aldermen, and crafts, with eighty torch-bearers, went to attend service at St. Paul's. The steeple, however, was never re-erected, in spite of Queen Elizabeth's angry remonstrances.

In the first year of Philip and Mary, the Common Council of London passed an act which shows the degradation into which St. Paul's had sunk even before the fire. It forbade the carrying of beer-casks, or baskets of bread, fish, flesh, or fruit, or leading mules or horses through the Cathedral, under pain of fines and imprisonment. Elizabeth also issued a proclamation to a similar effect, forbidding a fray, drawing of swords in the church, or shooting with hand-gun or dagg within the church or churchyard, under pain of two months' imprisonment. Neither were agreements to be made for the payment of money within the church. Soon after the fire, a man that had provoked a fray in the church was set in the pillory in the churchyard, and had his ears nailed to a post, and then cut off. These proclamations, however, led to no reform. Cheats, gulls, assassins, and thieves thronged the middle aisle of St. Paul's; advertisements of all kinds covered the walls, the worst class of servants came there to be hired; worthless rascals and disreputable flaunting women met there by appointment. Parasites, hunting for a dinner, hung about a monument of the Beauchamps, foolishly believed to be the tomb of the good Duke Humphrey. Shakespeare makes Falstaff hire red-nosed Bardolph in St. Paul's, and Ben Jonson lays the third act of his Every Man in his Humour in the middle aisle. Bishop Earle, in his "Microcosmography," describes the noise of the crowd of idlers in Paul's "as that of bees, a strange hum mixed of walking tongues and feet, a kind of still roar or loud whisper." He describes the crowd of young curates, copper captains, thieves, and dinnerless adventurers and gossip-mongers. Bishop Corbet, that jolly prelate, speaks of

"The walk, Where all our British sinners swear and talk, Old hardy ruffians, bankrupts, soothsayers, And youths whose cousenage is old as theirs."

On the eve of the election of Sandys as Bishop of London, May, 1570, all London was roused by a papal bull against Elizabeth being found nailed on the gates of the bishop's palace. It declared her crown forfeited and her people absolved from their oaths of allegiance. The fanatic maniac, Felton, was soon discovered, and hung on a gallows at the bishop's gates.

One or two anecdotes of interest specially connect Elizabeth with St. Paul's. On one occasion Dean Nowell placed in the queen's closet (pew) a splendid prayer-book, full of German scriptural engravings, richly illuminated. The zealous queen was furious; the book seemed to her of Catholic tendencies.

"Who placed this book on my cushion? You know I have an aversion to idolatry. The cuts resemble angels and saints--nay, even grosser absurdities."

The frightened dean pleaded innocence of all evil intentions. The queen prayed God to grant him more wisdom for the future, and asked him where they came from. When told Germany, she replied, "It is well it was a stranger. Had it been one of my subjects, we should have questioned the matter."

Once again Dean Nowell vexed the queen--this time from being too Puritan. On Ash Wednesday, 1572, the dean preaching before her, he denounced certain popish superstitions in a book recently dedicated to her majesty. He specially denounced the use of the sign of the cross. Suddenly a harsh voice was heard in the royal closet. It was Elizabeth's. She chidingly bade Mr. Dean return from his ungodly digression and revert to his text. The next day the frightened dean wrote a most abject apology to the high-spirited queen.

The victory over the Armada was, of course, not forgotten at St. Paul's. When the thanksgiving sermon was preached at Paul's Cross, eleven Spanish ensigns waved over the cathedral battlements, and one idolatrous streamer with an image of the Virgin fluttered over the preacher. That was in September; the Queen herself came in November, drawn by four white horses, and with the privy council and all the nobility. Elizabeth heard a sermon, and dined at the bishop's palace.

The "children of Paul's," whom Shakespeare, in Hamlet, mentions with the jealousy of a rival manager, were, as Dean Milman has proved, the chorister-boys of St. Paul's. They acted, it is supposed, in their singing-school. The play began at four p.m., after prayers, and the price of admission was 4d. They are known at a later period to have acted some of Lily's Euphuistic plays, and one of Middleton's.

In this reign lotteries for Government purposes were held at the west door of St. Paul's, where a wooden shed was erected for drawing the prizes, which were first plate and then suits of armour. In the first lottery (1569) there were 40,000 lots at 10s. a lot, and the profits were applied to repairing the harbours of England.

In the reign of James I. blood was again shed before St. Paul's. Years before a bishop had been murdered at the north door; now, before the west entrance (in January, 1605-6), four of the desperate Gunpowder Plot conspirators (Sir Everard Digby, Winter, Grant, and Bates) were there hung, drawn, and quartered. Their attempt to restore the old religion by one blow ended in the hangman's strangling rope and the executioner's cruel knife. In the May following a man of less-proven guilt (Garnet, the Jesuit) suffered the same fate in St. Paul's Churchyard; and zealots of his faith affirmed that on straws saved from the scaffold miraculous portraits of their martyr were discovered.

The ruinous state of the great cathedral, still without a tower, now aroused the theological king. He first tried to saddle the bishop and chapter, but Lord Southampton, Shakespeare's friend, interposed to save them. Then the matter went to sleep for twelve years. In 1620 the king again awoke, and came in state with all his lords on horseback, to hear a sermon at the Cross and to view the church. A royal commission followed, Inigo Jones, the king's protégé, whom James had brought from Denmark, being one of the commissioners. The sum required was estimated at £22,536. The king's zeal ended here; and his favourite, Buckingham, borrowed the stone collected for St. Paul's for his Strand palace, and from parts of it was raised that fine watergate still existing in the Thames Embankment gardens.

When Charles I. made that narrow-minded churchman, Laud, Bishop of London, one of Laud's first endeavours was to restore St. Paul's. Charles I. was a man of taste, and patronised painting and architecture. Inigo Jones was already building the Banqueting House at Whitehall. The king was so pleased with Inigo's design for the new portico of St. Paul's, that he proposed to pay for that himself. Laud gave £1,200. The fines of the obnoxious and illegal High Commission Court were set apart for the same object. The small sheds and houses round the west front were ruthlessly cleared away. All shops in Cheapside and Lombard Street, except goldsmiths, were to be shut up, that the eastern approach to St. Paul's might appear more splendid. The church of St. Gregory, at the south-west wing of the cathedral, was removed and rebuilt. Inigo Jones cut away all the decayed stone and crumbling Gothic work of the Cathedral, and on the west portico expended all the knowledge he had acquired in his visit to Rome. The result was a pagan composite, beautiful but incongruous. The front, 161 feet long and 162 feet high, was supported by fourteen Corinthian columns. On the parapet above the pillars Inigo proposed that there should stand ten statues of princely benefactors of St. Paul's. At each angle of the west front there was a tower. The portico was intended for a Paul's Walk, to drain off the profanation from within.

Nor were the London citizens backward. One most large-hearted man, Sir Paul Pindar, a Turkey merchant who had been ambassador at Constantinople, and whose house is still to be seen in Bishopsgate Street, contributed £10,000 towards the screen and south transept. The statues of James and Charles were set up over the portico, and the steeple was begun, when the storm arose that soon whistled off the king's unlucky head. The coming troubles cast shadows around St. Paul's. In March, 1639, a paper was found in the yard of the deanery, before Laud's house, inscribed--"Laud, look to thyself. Be assured that thy life is sought, as thou art the fountain of all wickedness;" and in October, 1640, the High Commission sitting at St. Paul's, nearly 2,000 Puritans made a tumult, tore down the benches in the consistory, and shouted, "We will have no bishops and no High Commission."

The Parliament made short work with St. Paul's, of Laud's projects, and Inigo Jones's classicalisms. They at once seized the £17,000 or so left of the subscription. To Colonel Jephson's regiment, in arrears for pay, £1,746, they gave the scaffolding round St. Paul's tower, and in pulling it to pieces down came part of St. Paul's south transept. The copes in St. Paul's were burnt (to extract the gold), and the money sent to the persecuted Protestant poor in Ireland. The silver vessels were sold to buy artillery for Cromwell. There was a story current that Cromwell intended to sell St. Paul's to the Jews for a synagogue. The east end of the church was walled in for a Puritan lecturer; the graves were desecrated; the choir became a cavalry barracks; the portico was let out to sempsters and hucksters, who lodged in rooms above; James and Charles were toppled from the portico; while the pulpit and cross were entirely destroyed. The dragoons in St. Paul's became so troublesome to the inhabitants by their noisy brawling games and their rough interruption of passengers, that in 1651 we find them forbidden to play at ninepins from six a.m. to nine p.m.

When the Restoration came, sunshine again fell upon the ruins. Wren, that great genius, was called in. His report was not very favourable. The pillars were giving way; the whole work had been from the beginning ill designed and ill built; the tower was leaning. He proposed to have a rotunda, with cupola and lantern, to give the church light, "and incomparable more grace" than the lean shaft of a steeple could possibly afford. He closed his report by a eulogy on the portico of Inigo Jones, as "an absolute piece in itself." Some of the stone collected for St. Paul's went, it is said, to build Lord Clarendon's house (site of Albemarle Street). On August 27, 1661, good Mr. Evelyn, one of the commissioners, describes going with Wren, the Bishop and Dean of St. Paul's, &c., and resolving finally on a new foundation. On Sunday, September 2, the Great Fire drew a red cancelling line over Wren's half-drawn plans. The old cathedral passed away, like Elijah, in flames. The fire broke out about ten o'clock on Saturday night at a bakehouse in Pudding Lane, near East Smithfield. Sunday afternoon Pepys found all the goods carried that morning to Cannon Street now removing to Lombard Street. At St. Paul's Wharf he takes water, follows the king's party, and lands at Bankside. "In corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the city, a most horrid, bloody, malicious flame, not like the flame of an ordinary fire." On the 7th, he saw St. Paul's Church with all the roof off, and the body of the quire fallen into St. Faith's.

On Monday, the 3rd, Mr. Evelyn describes the whole north of the City on fire, the sky light for ten miles round, and the scaffolds round St. Paul's catching. On the 4th he saw the stones of St. Paul's flying like grenades, the melting lead running in streams down the streets, the very pavements too hot for the feet, and the approaches too blocked for any help to be applied. A Westminster boy named Taswell (quoted by Dean Milman from "Camden's Miscellany," vol. ii., p. 12) has also sketched the scene. On Monday, the 3rd, from Westminster he saw, about eight o'clock, the fire burst forth, and before nine he could read by the blaze a 16mo "Terence" which he had with him. The boy at once set out for St. Paul's, resting by the way upon Fleet Bridge, being almost faint with the intense heat of the air. The bells were melting, and vast avalanches of stones were pouring from the walls. Near the east end he found the body of an old woman, who had cowered there, burned to a coal. Taswell also relates that the ashes of the books kept in St. Faith's were blown as far as Eton.

On the 7th (Friday) Evelyn again visited St. Paul's. The portico he found rent in pieces, the vast stones split asunder, and nothing remaining entire but the inscription on the architrave, not one letter of which was injured. Six acres of lead on the roof were all melted. The roof of St. Faith's had fallen in, and all the magazines and books from Paternoster Row were consumed, burning for a week together. Singularly enough, the lead over the altar at the east end was untouched, and among the monuments the body of one bishop (Braybroke--Richard II.) remained entire. The old tombs nearly all perished; amongst them those of two Saxon kings, John of Gaunt, his wife Constance of Castile, poor St. Erkenwald, and scores of bishops, good and bad; Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth's Lord Keeper, and father of the great philosopher; the last of the true knights, the gallant Sir Philip Sidney; and Walsingham, that astute counsellor of Elizabeth. Then there was Sir Christopher Hatton, the dancing chancellor, whose proud monument crowded back Walsingham and Sidney's. According to the old scoffing distich,

"Philip and Francis they have no tomb, For great Christopher takes all the room."

Men of letters in old St. Paul's (says Dean Milman) there were few. The chief were Lily, the grammarian, second master of St. Paul's; and Linacre, the physician, the friend of Colet and Erasmus. Of artists there was at least one great man--Vandyck, who was buried near John of Gaunt. Among citizens, the chief was Sir William Hewet, whose daughter married Osborne, an apprentice, who saved her from drowning, and who was the ancestor of the Dukes of Leeds.

After the fire, Bishop Sancroft preached in a patched-up part of the west end of the ruins. All hopes of restoration were soon abandoned, as Wren had, with his instinctive genius, at once predicted. Sancroft at once wrote to the great architect, "What you last whispered in my ear is now come to pass. A pillar has fallen, and the rest threatens to follow." The letter concludes thus: "You are so absolutely necessary to us, that we can do nothing, resolve on nothing, without you." There was plenty of zeal in London still; but, nevertheless, after all, nothing was done to the rebuilding till the year 1673.

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