"London: that great sea whose ebb and flow "Citizens of no mean city." The history of London is—as was that of Rome in ancient times—the history of the whole civilised world. For, the comparatively small area of earth on which our city is built has, for the last thousand years at least, been all-important in the story of nations. Its chronicles are already so vast that no ordinary library could hope to contain all of them. And what will the history of London be to the student, say, of the year 3000 A.D., when our present day politics, our feelings, our views, have been "rolled round," once more, in "earth's diurnal force," and assume, at last, their fair and true proportions? In "this northern island, sundered once from all the human The history of this mighty empire is bound up with the history of London. For, the history of London is that of England; it was the river, our "Father Thames"—her first and most important highway, a "highway of the nations,"—that brought her from the beginning all her fame and all her glory. Partly by geographical position, partly by ever-increasing political freedom, and partly, no doubt, by the efforts of a dominant race, that glory has, through the centuries, been maintained and aggrandised. And why, some may ask, is London what it is? Why was this spot specially chosen as the capital? Surrounded by marshes in early Roman times, periodically inundated by its tidal river, densely wooded beyond its marshes, it can hardly have seemed, in the beginning, an ideal site. Why was not Winchester—so important in Roman times, and, later, the capital of Wessex—preferred? Why were not Southampton or Bristol—apparently equally well placed for trade—favoured? We cannot tell. The site may have been chosen by Roman London because it was the most convenient point for passing, and guarding, the ferry or bridge over the Thames, and for keeping up the direct communication between the more northerly cities of Britain, and Rome. Or, the nearer proximity to the large Continent, the better conditions for trade offered by the wide estuary of the Thames, possibly account for London's supremacy. The early Roman city on this time-honoured site, the poetically named "Augusta,"—that replaced the primitive British village—flourished greatly in the early days of the Christian era, and was large and populous; though the Romans did not consider it their capital, and never—we know not why—created it a "municipium," like Eboracum (York), or Verulamium. It All this seems, perhaps, little when we think of the undoubted wealth and power of the old "Londinium," or "Augusta." But it has always been the city's fate to have its Past overgrown and stifled by the enthralling energy and life of its Present. It is as a hive that has never been emptied of its successive swarms. This is, more or less, the fate of all towns that "live." The Roman town was, of course, strongly walled, and the names of its gates have descended to us in the present "Ludgate," "Moorgate," "Billingsgate," "Aldgate," &c.—names very familiar to us children of a later age—and now mainly associated with the more prosaic stations on the Underground Railway! Nevertheless, prosaic as they are, these stations commemorate the old localities. Roman London was at no time large in circumference, extending only from the Tower to As for the ancient highways of London, very possibly these did not differ greatly in their course from our modern ones; for the Anglo-Saxon race has always been very conservative in rebuilding its new streets, regardless of symmetry or directness, on the lines of the destroyed ones. At any rate, we know that the original church of St. Paul's—the first of three built on this site, founded by Ethelbert about the year 610—and that of Westminster—altered, rebuilt, and enlarged by successive kings—must have early sanctified these spots, and necessitated thoroughfares between the two. Nay, even in Roman times, temples of Diana and Apollo are believed to have adorned these historic sites. It is strange, indeed, that the old, long-vanished Roman wall, pierced only by a few gates, Sandwich-board Men. The high antiquity and conservatism of London are shown in nothing more than in these narrow, crooked streets—streets so different from those of any other big metropolis—streets that our American cousins, in all the superiority of their regular "block" system, permit themselves to jeer at! We know, however, little for certain of the actual topography of London streets, until the important publication of Ralph Aggas's map in 1563, soon after Elizabeth had begun to reign. This map of "Civitas Londinium" is strange enough to look at in our own day. Its main arteries are the same as ours: the ancient highway of the Strand is still the Strand; those of "Chepe" and "Fleete" still flourish; Oxford Street, then the "Oxford Road" and "The Waye to Uxbridge," ran between hedgerows and pastures, in which, according to Aggas, grotesque beasts sported; the thoroughfare of the "Hay Market,"—not yet, indeed, "a scene of revelry by night,"—curves between vast meadows, in one of which a woman of gigantic size appears to be engaged in It is strange that London fires—and London, in the middle ages, was specially prolific in fires—have never altered the course of the city's highways. Sir Christopher Wren wished, indeed, after the Great Fire of 1666, to be allowed to alter the plan of the desolated town and make it more symmetrically regular: with all due admiration of his genius, one cannot, however, help feeling a certain thankfulness that destiny averted his schemes, and that in the prosaic London of our own day we can still trace the splendour, the romance of its past. Thus, even in the grimy city "courts" we can still imagine a Roman "impluvium," or the ancient gardens of Plantagenet palaces; in the blind alleys of "Little Britain," the splendours of the merchants' mansions; in the ugly lines of mews and slums, the limits of the vanished Norman convent closes. The boundaries are still there, though nearly all else has gone. For, though Londoners are generally conservative with regard to their chief sites and the lines of their streets, they have, so far as their great buildings are concerned, always been by nature iconoclastic. Not that we of the present day need give ourselves any airs in this matter. Although, indeed, for the last half-century the spirit of antiquarian veneration has been abroad, yet the great majority of Londoners are hardly affected by it, and the pulling down of ancient buildings continues almost as gaily as ever at the present day. It may be said that we pull down for utilitarian reasons; well, so did our forefathers; Londoners have always been practical. Religious zeal may occasionally have served to whet their destructive "It is (he says of the Reformation) at first hard to understand how there should have been, even among the baser sort, so little reverence for the past, so little regard for art; that these treasure-houses of precious marbles and rare carvings should have been rifled and destroyed without raising so much as a murmur; nay, that the very buildings themselves should have been pulled down without a protest.... It seems to us impossible that the tombs of so many worthies should have been destroyed without the indignation of all who knew the story of the past.... Yet ... it is unfortunately too true that there is not, at any time or with any people, reverence for things venerable, old, and historical, save with a few. The greater part are careless of the past, unable to see or feel anything but the present.... The parish churches were filled with ruins, ... the past was gone.... The people lived among the ruins but regarded them not, any more than the vigorous growth within the court of a roofless Norman castle regards the donjon and the walls. They did not inquire into the history of the ruins; they did not want to preserve them; they took away the stones and sold them for new buildings." Yet, though in London's history there were, as we have seen, occasional great upheavals, such as the Reformation, the Fires, the Protectorate, it was more the rule of change that went on unceasingly between whiles—change, such as we see it to-day, the incessant beat of the waves on the shore—that A few of the great monastic foundations of London escaped Henry VIII.'s acquisitive zeal, and have, as modern school-boys have reason to know, been devoted to educational and other charitable aims. It was, indeed, eminently suitable that in the classic precincts of the ruined monastery of the "Grey Friars" should arise a great school—the School of Christ's Hospital (colloquially termed the "Blue-Coat School")—where, till but the other day, the "young barbarians" might be seen at play behind their iron barriers, backed by the fine old whitely-gleaming, buttressed hall that faces Newgate Street. It was fitting, too, that the early dwelling of the English Carthusian monks—the place where Prior Houghton, with all the staunchness of his race, met death rather than cede to the tyrant one jot of his ancient right—should become not only a great educational foundation, but also a shelter for the aged and the poor. We know it as the "Charterhouse"; as a picturesque, rambling building of sobered red-brick, built around many courtyards, its principal entrance under an archway that faces the quiet Charterhouse Square. The place Yet the Charterhouse is, so to speak, an "insula" by itself in London, a world of its own; possessing an ancient sanctity undisturbed by the neighbouring din of busy Smithfield, the unending bustle of the great city. More essentially of London is the curious unexpectedness of buildings, places, and associations. What is so strange to the inexperienced wanderer among London byways is the manner in which bits of ancient garden, fragments of old, forgotten churchyards, isolated towers of destroyed churches, deserted closes, courts and slums of wild dirt and no less wild picturesqueness, suddenly confront the pedestrian, recalling incongruous ideas, and historical associations puzzling in their very wealth of entangled detail. The "layers" left by succeeding eras are thinly divided; and the study of London's history is as difficult to the neophyte as that of the successive "layers" of the Roman Forum. The Shoeblack. It is sometimes refreshing to note that, even in the City and in our own utilitarian day, present beauty has not been altogether lost sight of. There is in modern London, as a French writer lately remarked, "no street without a church and a tree"; this is especially true of the City, where, even in crowded Cheapside, the big plane-tree of Wood Street still towers over its surrounding houses, hardly more than a stone's throw from the shadow cast by the white steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow, glimmering in ghostly grace above the busy street. So busy indeed is the street, that hardly a pedestrian stays to notice either church or tree; yet is there a more beautiful highway than this in all London? It is satisfactory to reflect—when one thinks of the accusation brought against us that we are "a nation of shopkeepers"—on what this one big But the sprinkling of old churches, with their odd, abbreviated churchyards, that are still to be found amid the busy life of the City of London, hardly does more than faintly recall that picturesque and poetic time when the church and the convent were pre-eminent. The great temporal power of the Church in London, that held sway during long centuries, is vanished, forgotten, supplanted as if it had never been. Do the very names of Blackfriars and Whitefriars suggest, for instance, to us, "the latest seed of time," anything more than the shrieking of railway terminuses, or the incessant din of printing machines? For, while the memory of the "Grey Friars" and that of the Carthusians is still honoured and kept green in the dignified "foundations" of Christ's Hospital and of the Charterhouse,—the orders of the "White" and "Black" Friars, of the Carmelites, and the stern Dominicans, have descended to baser and more worldly uses. Destroyed at the Reformation, its riches alienated, its glory departed, the splendid Abbey Church of the Dominicans came to be used as a storehouse for the "properties" of pageants; "strange fate," says Sir Walter Besant, "for the house of the Dominicans, those austere 'upholders of doctrine.'" For the dwelling of the "Carmelites," or "White Friars," an Order of "Mendicants" these,—another destiny waited—a destiny for long lying unfolded in the bosom of our "wondrous mother-age." Mysterious irony of Fate! that where the Carmelite monks, in their Norman apse, prayed and laboured; where the Mendicant Friars wandered to and fro in the echoing cloister, the thunder of the printing-press should have made its home: "There rolls the deep where grew the tree, —The "Daily Mail Young Man"—that smart product of a "Look well" (he continues),—"thou seest everywhere a new Clergy of the Mendicant Orders, some bare-footed, some almost bare-backed, fashion itself into shape, and teach and preach, zealously enough, for copper alms and the love of God." Carlyle, apparently, nursed an old grudge against the press,—for this is not the only occasion when he fulminates against the new order of Mendicants. The theatres, also, that succeeded the monasteries of Blackfriars were, here too, supplanted by the Press; under Printing-House-Square only lately, an extension of the Times Office brought to light substantial remains. But the Church was not the only mediÆval beautifier of London; as her temporal power and splendour waned,—the splendour of the merchants grew and flourished. For the great supplanter of the power of the Church was, as already hinted, the power of the City Companies. These immense trades-unions began to rise in the fourteenth century, when the old feudal system gave way to the civic community;—and they increased greatly in strength after the dissolution of the Monasteries. These companies incorporated each trade, and had supreme powers over wages, hours of labour, output, &c. In the beginning they were, like everything else, partly religious, each company or "guild" having its patron saint and its special place of worship;—the Merchant Taylors, for instance, being called the "Guild of St. John";—the Grocers, the "Guild of St. Anthony"; while St. Martin protected the saddlers, and so on. These guilds in time receiving Royal charters, became very rich When the Strand is up. I have only touched at the mere abstract of London's voluminous history,—only enumerated a poor few of her Highways and Byways; the subject, in truth, is too great to exhaust even in a whole library of books. It is, indeed, the principal drawback to the study of London that she is too vast—that the student is ever in danger of "not seeing the forest for the trees." Her byways are as the sands of the sea in multitude; her history is the history of the world. It is, perhaps, better that the stranger to the metropolis should take in hand a small portion at a time,—and try to grasp that thoroughly,—than lose himself in an intricate maze of buildings and associations. To read the history of London aright,—to see and feel in London stones all that can be seen and felt, requires not only untiring energy, but also knowledge, sympathy, intuition, patriotism, one and all combined. To know London really well, one should gain an intimate acquaintance with her from day to day, not being contented with the "The Duke of St. James's," (he says),—"took his way to the Regent's Park, a wild sequestered spot, whither he invariably repaired when he did not wish to be noticed; for the inhabitants of this pretty suburb are a distinct race, and although their eyes are not unobserving, from their inability to speak the language of London they are unable to communicate their observations." So far from being merely one town, London is really a hundred townlets amalgamated. The visitor can there find everything that he wants; he must, however, know exactly what it is that he wants to find. Does he desire to see pictures? many galleries of priceless works of art are within a stone's throw, free, ready, waiting only to be seen; does he prefer realism and life? the "street markets" of Leather Lane and of Goodge Street are instinct with all possible types of humanity; does he yearn for peaceful solitude, historic association? the quiet nooks of the Temple invite him; is it solitary study that his soul craves? the immense library of the British Museum offers him all its treasures; does he merely wish to perambulate vaguely? even the prosaic Oxford Street presents a very kaleidoscope of human life. Nevertheless, in his perambulations, the wanderer should receive a word of warning: let him beware of asking for local information (save indeed, it be of a policeman), for two reasons. Firstly, because no born Londoner of the great middle class ever knows, except by the merest accident, anything whatever about his near neighbourhood; and, secondly, because if he do get an answer, he is morally certain to be misdirected. The wanderer should always start on his expeditions with a distinct The great charm, however, of London lies in its unsuspected courts and byways. From most of these big thoroughfares you may be transported, with hardly more than a step, into Space, however, is limited; I have now said enough to give some idea, even to the uninitiated, of London's many "Miring his outward steps who inly trode Yes, the love of London grows on the constant Londoner. He will not be long happy away from the comforting hum of the busy streets, from the mighty pulse of the machine. In absence his heart will ever fondly turn to "streaming London's central roar," to the spot where, more than anywhere else, he may be at once the inheritor of all the ages. How interesting would it be if one could only—by the aid of some Mr. Wells's "Time Machine"—take a series of flying leaps backward into the abysm of time! Strange to imagine the experience! Beauty, one reflects, might be gained at nearly every step, at the expense, alas! of sanitary conditions, knowledge, and utility. Let us, for a moment, imagine how the thing would be.... First, in a few rapid revolutions of the wheel, would disappear the hideous criss-cross of electric wires overhead, the ugly tangle of suburban tram-lines, and the greater part of the hideous modern growth of suburbs.... Another whirl of the machine, and every sign of a railway station would disappear, every repulsive engine shed and siding Waterloo Bridge. |