INSTEAD of wasting words on traditions which few can believe, or filling my pages with accounts of the fabulous kings who are said to have descended from Æneas, and to have reigned in Britain centuries before the Roman Invasion, I shall commence the present work by shewing that the remote past will ever remain a mystery which man is not permitted to penetrate. The following opening to my History of the Anglo-Saxons applies to the “unknown” origin of London—the new Troy of ancient fiction—the Augusta of the Romans—for in it I have described my impression of the unwritten History of the Past:

“Almost every historian has set out by regretting how little is known of the early inhabitants of Great Britain and its metropolis—a loss which only the lovers of hoar antiquity deplore, since, from all we can with certainty glean from the pages of contemporary history, we should find but little more to interest us than if we possessed written records of the remotest origin of the Red Indians; for both would alike but be the history of an unlettered and uncivilised race. The same dim obscurity, with scarcely an exception, hangs over the primeval inhabitants of every other country; and if we lift up the mysterious curtain which has so long fallen over and concealed the past, we only obtain glimpses of obscure hieroglyphics; and, from the unmeaning fables of monsters and giants, to which the rudest nations trace their origin, we but glance backward and backward, to find that civilised Rome and classic Greece can produce no better authorities than old undated traditions, teeming with fabulous accounts of heathen gods and goddesses. What we can see of the remote past through the half-darkened twilight of time, is as of a great and unknown sea, on which some solitary ship is afloat, whose course we cannot trace through the shadows which every where deepen around her, nor tell what strange land lies beyond the dim horizon to which she seems bound. The dark night of mystery has for ever settled down upon the early history of our island, and the first dawning which throws the shadow of man upon the scene, reveals a rude hunter clad in the skins of beasts of the chase, whose path is disputed by the maned and shaggy bison, whose rude hut in the forest fastnesses is pitched beside the lair of the hungry wolf, and whose first conquest is the extirpation of these formidable animals. And so, in as few words, might the early history of any other country be written. The shores of Time are thickly strewn with the remains of extinct animals, which, when living, the eye of man never looked upon, as if from the deep sea of Eternity had heaved up one wave, which washed over and blotted out for ever all that was coeval with her silent and ancient reign, leaving a monument upon the confines of this old and obliterated world, for man in a future day to read, on which stands ever engraven the solemn sentence, ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther: beyond this boundary all is mine!’

“Neither does this mystery end here; for around the monuments which were reared by the earliest inhabitants of Great Britain there still reigns a deep darkness; we know not what hands piled together the rude remains of Stonehenge; we have but few records of the manners, the customs, or the religion of the early Britons: here and there a colossal barrow heaves up above the dead; we look within, and find a few bones, a few rude weapons, either used in war or the chase, and these are all; and we linger in wonderment around such remains! Who those ancient voyagers were that first called England the ‘Country of Sea Cliffs,’ we know not; and while we sit and brood over the rude fragments of the Welsh Triads, we become so entangled in doubt and mystery as to look upon the son of Aedd the Great, and the Island of Honey to which he sailed, and wherein he found no man alive, as the pleasing dream of some old and forgotten poet; and we set out again with no more success to discover who were the earliest inhabitants of England, leaving the ancient Cymri and the country of Summer behind, and the tall, silent cliffs to stand, as they had done for ages, looking over a wide and mastless sea.

“We then look among the ancient names of the headlands, and harbours, and mountains, and hills, and valleys, and endeavour to trace a resemblance to the language spoken by some neighbouring nation; and we only glean up a few scattered words, which leave us still in doubt, like a confusion of echoes, one breaking in upon the other; a minglement of Celtic, Pictish, Gaulish, and Saxon sounds; where, if for a moment but one is audible and distinct, it is drowned by other successive clamours which come panting up with a still louder claim; and in very despair we are compelled to step back again into the old primeval silence. There we find geology looking daringly into the formation of the early world, and boldly proclaiming that there was a period of time when our island heaved up bare and desolate amid the silence of the surrounding ocean—when on its ancient promontories and grey granite peaks not a green branch waved nor a blade of grass grew; and no living thing, saving the tiny corals, as they piled dome upon dome above the naked foundations of this early world, stirred in the ‘deep profound’ which reigned over those sleeping seas. Onward they go, boldly discoursing of undated centuries that have passed away, during which they tell us the ocean swarmed with huge monstrous forms; and that all those countless ages have left to record their flight are but the remains of a few extinct reptiles and fishes, whose living likenesses never again appeared in the world. To another measureless period are we fearlessly carried—so long as to be only numbered in the account of time which eternity keeps—and other forms, we are told, moved over the floors of dried-up oceans—vast animals which no human eye ever looked upon alive; these, they say, also were swept away, and their ponderous remains had long mingled with and enriched the earth; but man had not as yet appeared, nor in any corner of the whole wide world do they discover, in the deep-buried layers of the earth, a single vestige of the remains of the human race.

“What historian, then, while such proofs as these are before his eyes, will not hesitate ere he ventures to assert who were the first inhabitants of any country, whence they came, or at what period of time that country was first peopled? As well might he attempt a description of the scenery over which the mornings of the early world first broke,—of summit and peak which, ages ago, have been hurled down, and ground and powdered into atoms. What matters it about the date when such things once were, or at what time or place they first appeared? We can gaze upon the gigantic remains of the mastodon or mammoth, or on the grey silent ruins of Stonehenge; but at what period of time the one roamed over our island, or in what year the other was first reared, will for ever remain a mystery. The earth beneath our feet is lettered over with proofs that there was an age in which these extinct monsters existed, and that period is unmarked by any proof of the existence of man in our island. And during those not improbable periods, when oceans were emptied and dried amid the heaving up and burying of rocks and mountains,—when volcanoes reddened the dark midnights of the world, when the “earth was without form and void,”—what mind can picture aught but His Spirit “moving upon the face of the waters?”—what mortal eye could have looked upon the rocking and reeling of those chaotic ruins when their rude forms first heaved up into the light? Is not such a world stamped with the imprint of the Omnipotent—from when He first paved its foundation with enduring granite, and roofed it over with the soft blue of heaven, and lighted it by day with the glorious sun, and hung out the moon and stars to gladden the night, until at last He fashioned a world beautiful enough for the abode of his “own image” to dwell in: then He created man. And what matters it whether or not we believe in all these mighty epochs? Surely it is enough for us to discover throughout every change of time the loving-kindness of God for mankind: we see how fitting this globe was at last made for man’s dwelling-place; that before the great Architect had put his last finish to his mighty work, instead of leaving us to starve amid the Silurian sterility, He prepared the world for man, and in place of the naked granite, spread out a rich carpet of verdure for him to tread upon, then flung upon it a profusion of the sweetest flowers. Let us not, then, daringly stand by, and say thus it was fashioned, and so it was formed; but by our silence acknowledge that it never yet entered the heart of man to conceive how the Almighty Creator laid the foundation of the world.

“To his great works must we ever come with reverential knee, and before them lowly bow; for the grey rocks, and the high mountain summits, and the wide-spreading plains, and the ever-sounding seas, are stamped with the image of Eternity; a mighty shadow ever hangs over them. The grey and weather-beaten headlands still look over the sea, and the solemn mountains still slumber under their old midnight shadows; but what human ear first heard the murmur of the waves upon the beaten beach, or what human foot first climbed up those high-piled summits, we can never know.

“What would it benefit us could we discover the date when our island was buried beneath the ocean; when what was dry land in one age became the sea in another; when volcanoes glowed angrily under the dark skies of the early world, and huge extinct monsters bellowed and roamed through the old forests and swam in the ancient rivers, which have perhaps ages ago been swept away? What could we find more to interest us were we in possession of the names, the ages, and the numbers of the first adventurers who were perchance driven by some storm upon our sea-beaten coast, than what is said in the ancient Triad before alluded to? “There were no more men alive, nor any thing but bears, wolves, beavers, and the oxen with the high prominence,” when Aedd landed upon the shores of England. What few traces we have of the religious rites of the early inhabitants of Great Britain vary but little from such as have been brought to light by modern travellers who have landed in newly-discovered countries in our own age. They worshipped idols, and had no knowledge of the true God; and, saving in those lands where the early patriarchs dwelt, the same Egyptian darkness settled over the whole world. The ancient Greeks and Romans considered all nations, except themselves, barbarians; nor do the Chinese of the present day look upon us in a more favourable light; while we, acknowledging their antiquity as a nation, scarcely number them amongst such as are civilised. We have yet to learn by what hands the round towers of Ireland were reared, and by what race the few ancient British monuments that still remain were piled together, ere we can enter those mysterious gates which open upon the history of the past. We find the footprint of man there, but who he was, or whence he came, we know not; he lived and died, and whether or not posterity would ever think of the rude monuments he left behind concerned him not; whether the stones would mark the temple in which he worshipped, or tumble down and cover his grave, concerned not his creed; with his hatchet of stone, and spear-head of flint, he hewed his way from the cradle to the tomb; and under the steep barrow he knew that he should sleep his last sleep, and, with his arms folded upon his breast, he left the dead past to bury its dead: he lived not for us.”

At what remote period of time the spot on which London now stands was first peopled can never be known. A few rude huts peering perchance through the forest-trees, with grassy openings that went sloping downwards to the edge of the Thames, where the ancient Briton embarked in his rude coracle, or boat made of wicker and covered with the hides of oxen,—a pile of rugged stones on the summit of the hill which marked the cromlech, or druidical altar, and probably stood on the spot now occupied by St. Paul’s, and which nearly two thousand years ago was removed to make room for the Roman temple dedicated to Victory—was, from all we know of other ancient British towns, the appearance of London soon after the period when the old Cymri first landed in England, and called it the “Country of Sea-Cliffs.”

We next see it through the dim twilight of time occupied by the Romans. Triumphal arches and pillared temples and obelisks look down upon the streets of the Roman city. Then comes Boadicea thundering at the head of her revengeful Britons in her war-chariot: we hear the tramp of horses and the dealing of heavy blows; see the tesselated pavement stained with blood; behold pale faces upturned in the grim repose of death; then many a night of darkness again settles upon the streets of the old city.

ROMAN HYPOCAUST, THAMES-STREET.
ROMAN HYPOCAUST, THAMES-STREET.

But deep down it is rich in Roman remains; far below the invading legions tramped, upheaving the victorious eagles above the dim old tesselated pavements; for London has its Pompeii and Herculaneum. Unnumbered generations have trampled into dust its splendour, even as our own glory may one day be mingled in the urn that holds the ashes of empires. Crushed Samian ware, a rusted demi-god, a headless hero, whose very memory has perished; the coins of conquerors, whose features time and decay have corroded, and whose mere names (without a good or evil deed to tell how they came there,) are just catalogued in the “lots” of history; these are the mouldering remains of conquest, lying as far beneath our feet as we in intellectual arts have towered above their former possessors. We belong to the future, as they do to the present; and when we perish, our glory will be found lettered in every corner of the rounded globe. The finger of the shattered giant will be picked up in the remotest continent, and unborn generations will sigh, as they exclaim, “Here lies a fragment of the once mighty England that gave us life.”

Westward of London we turn backward, and endeavour to obtain a view of that ancient neighbourhood as it looked when the Roman city stood upon the hill; and the Strand, as it is still called, was a low, waste, and reedy shore, over which the tide came and went, and rocked the tufted reeds which waved over many a surrounding acre. Something like what it was in ancient days may yet be seen in those reedy and willowy inlets above the Red House at Battersea; and could we have stood and looked across the river while the spot on which Westminster now stands was an island, covered with thorns, and down to the water edged with green flags and rushes, we should have seen, far below what was called the Long Ditch (where the river divided, beside a low, lonely shore, on which the waves went lapping and surging, as they still do about those dreary bends that skirt the marshes of Woolwich), the fisherman in his coracle, the only figure that moved beside the sedgy margin of that mastless river, over which the piping of the tufted plover might then have been heard.

ROMAN REMAINS, FOUND IN THAMES-STREET.
ROMAN REMAINS, FOUND IN THAMES-STREET.

Turning to the ancient city, Erkenwin the Saxon first appears with his boasted descent from Wodin, the terrible god of battle, conquers the remnant of the ancient Britons, tramples upon their standard of the red dragon, and plants the banner of the white horse upon the rude fortifications of their capital. After many convulsions we see the kingdoms of the Octarchy overturned by Egbert, the first king of all the Saxons; and in some old hall, with its low stunted pillars and heavy vaulted roof (centuries ago levelled to the earth), we behold him seated gravely with his witenagemot, or assembly of wise men, deliberating upon the best means of repelling the incursions of the Danes. Under the reign of Ethelwulf the city is plundered by the stormy sea-kings and their fearless followers. We next see the army of Alfred hovering between the outskirts of the city and the foot of Highgate-hill, and protecting the old Londoners while they gather in their harvest; for Hastings, with his ivory horn swung to his baldric, was encamped with his Danish army beside the river Lea, and Alfred had thrown himself like a shield between the city and its enemies. We behold Etheldred the Unready escape into Normandy, and Sweyn, king of Denmark, passes the low-browed archway which leads into the capital. The old grey wall which stretched beside the Thames, where wharves and warehouses now stand, is defended by Edmund Ironside and his followers against Canute the Dane, and ships bearing the banner of the black raven are moving below the rude bridge, which at that early period stretched over into Southwark. Harold, the last king of the Saxons, next crosses that old bridge, in the sunset of an autumnal evening, on his way to the fatal field of Hastings; and when we again look upon those ancient streets they are filled with Norman soldiers, and echoing to the bray of Norman trumpets, for William the Conqueror is passing through the city to take possession of the remains of the old Roman Tower.

We next glance at that ancient bridge, covered with houses, which spanned across the Thames, part of which stood even a few years ago, and had, after much patching and repairing, endured the wear and tear of time, with all the assaults of wind, water, war, and fire, for above six hundred years. Even until within the last half century the wheels of the great water-works first erected by Peter the Dutchman continued to moan and groan, and splash and dash, just as they had done for many a weary year,—for those ever-moving water-wheels seemed like the living spirit of the old bridge; and when they stopped, the ancient fabric, which had so long tottered to its crazy foundations, was soon swept away and numbered amongst the things that have been. Narrow, dark, and dangerous was the gloomy old street that, hung between the water and the sky, went stretching across the broad bosom of the Thames. Great darksome gables spanned overhead every way; and if you looked up in the twilight of those past days, you saw grinning above you, and looking down from the battlements, the ghastly and gory heads of murdered men, which were stuck upon spikes and left to bleach in the sun, wind, rain, and darkness, day after day and night after night. When you looked down, you still seemed to see them, as if they moved side by side with you, past the windows of the old chapel, underneath the low-browed arches, beside the ancient shops; and ever below went the mad waters, gibbering and groaning and hissing; and in the deep midnight, when the old piers echoed back every footfall, you almost fancied that all those bodiless heads had leaped off the battlements, and, with their gory locks streaming out, were at your heels, hallooing and shrieking above and below the bridge, and “mopping and mowing” from every overhanging gable you hurried under.

When the wind was high, it ever went singing through those old houses and that silent chapel all night long; and the crazy old water-works sent out a thousand strange supernatural sounds; while all the rickety casements chattered again like a thousand teeth that have no power over the bitter blast which set them in motion. Then, too, the old swing-signs, which the least wind shook, swung and groaned upon their rusty hinges, one against the other; and what with the creaking of the signs, the whistling and moaning of the wind, that went booming with a hollow and unearthly sound under and over the vaulted street, mingled with the rush of the waters, and the cries for help from those beneath, who had run foul against the jutting sterlings, you wonder how any one could ever get a wink of sleep in those high old houses. That ancient bridge was the only highway into Kent and Surrey, and many a time had it been crossed by the conqueror and the conquered—one day a kingly procession, the next a train of prisoners in chains. It was alternately shaken by the shouts of Wat Tyler and his rebels, then by the acclaim which greeted some heroic king from the throats of the assembled citizens. And sometimes the drawbridge was raised, and the inhabitants of Southwark left to defend themselves as they could, while the citizens on the Middlesex side were safe, for between them there yawned an impassable gulf.

Below the Tower we find a few old churches and ancient mansions, which stood long before the Great Fire went reddening and blackening through the streets of the old City. The row of picturesque shops at the entrance of Whitechapel will recall the period when this was the court end of London. The second house, with the projecting bay-windows, is rich in ornamental details. The Prince of Wales’s feathers, the arms of Westminster, the fleur de lis of France, and thistle of Scotland are still standing on the front of this ancient mansion; and it is just possible that the house was once the residence of Prince Henry, son of James I., as the monogram, yet visible, bears the initials H.S., surmounted with plumes, which, very probably, stand for Henry Stuart. The Earls of Northumberland, the Throgmortons, and many noble families and wealthy merchants, in former days, resided in this neighbourhood; for, beside the Tower, there was Crosby-place at no great distance, where the Protector, afterwards Richard III., held his court.

How changed is this ancient neighbourhood! The very house in which the Black Prince lodged when he resided in the City had long before Stowe’s time been turned into an hostel, and the apartments in which grave councils were held, and where many a glorious victory was planned, even then echoed back the voice of some Francis, as, amid “the clinking of pewter,” he exclaimed, “Anon, anon, sir;” or, “Score a pint of bastard in the Half-Moon.” The citizens had at that early period turned into bowling-alleys the quaintly laid-out gardens in which the Percies of old Northumbria “took their pleasure;” and where some pretty Kate, shewing her pearly teeth, had no doubt threatened to “break the little finger” of her fiery Hotspur, who was too eager to leave her dainty bower and hasten to the wars.

He also has long since vanished—the haughty Prior of the Holy Trinity, who, with “jingling bridle” in hand, bestrode his prancing palfrey, and rode “second to none” amongst the rich aldermen of London, proud of his broad domains, which in those days extended to the margin of the Thames, and over many rich acres beside those on which Whitechapel now stands. No Earl of Salisbury now goes “sounding” through the City streets, with his long train of five hundred mounted followers, clad in his household livery, and causing the old shopkeepers to cease their cry of “What do you lack?” while they watched the gay cavalcade until it was lost under the low-browed archway that stood before his ancient City mansion by Dowgate.

Baynard Castle, where Henry VII. received his ambassadors, and in which the crafty Cecil plotted against Lady Jane Grey, almost before the ink was dry with which he had solemnly registered his name to serve her, has long ago been numbered amongst the things that were; and seldom do the “silver snarling trumpets,” with their loud acclaim, disturb the deep sleep of the old City, to announce the in-coming or the out-going of royalty. The archers of Mile-end, with their chains of gold, have departed. The spot on which the tent stood where bluff Hal regaled himself after having witnessed their sports, is now covered with mean-looking houses: the poetry of ancient London is dead. The voice of the stream is for ever hushed that went murmuring before the dwellings of our forefathers, along Aldgate and down Fenchurch-street, and past the door of Sir Thomas Gresham’s house in Lombard street, until it doubled round by the Mansion House and emptied itself into the river. There is still a sound of waters by the wharf at London Bridge; but, oh, how different from the “brawling brook” of former days is the evil odour that now arises from the poisonous sewer which there empties itself into the Thames!

Remains of ancient London are still to be found in the neighbourhood of Smithfield. The courts and alleys about Cloth Fair, and behind Long-lane, are perfect labyrinths, and so full of ins and outs, that they astonish the stranger who ventures to thread his way through them. Bartholomew’s Church is also one of the very oldest in the City; and we never look upon its weather-beaten tower without recalling the scenes which have taken place in the vast area which stretches out before it.

There is no spot in London richer in historical associations than Smithfield. There the marshal of England presided over the lists; and there also the mitred bishops congregated to gaze upon the poor martyr who was burnt at the stake: that old church-tower has many a time glared redly as it was lit up by the blaze of those consuming fires; its vaulted roof has echoed back the clang of arms, when battle-axe and sword clashed against helmet and shield, while scarcely a murmur arose from the lips of the mighty multitude that stood silent and breathless around the combatants.

Shakspeare and Ben Jonson have doubtless passed through those old narrow courts which still surround Bartholomew’s Church. It was to Smithfield Bardolph went to buy a horse, which we know he would steal if once allowed to get astride, and that, if any inquiries were made after it at the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap, Falstaff would avouch for Bardolph’s honesty. To us the whole neighbourhood is hallowed by a thousand poetical associations, and we never journey through it without feeling as if we were living again amid the past. As for Bartholomew Fair, though it now only lives in name, it will be remembered for ever in the works of rare Ben Jonson. To the thoughtful man it is a land of pleasant and solemn memories.

Then the streets of ancient London, what must they have been? In the west the roads were in such a state that the king could not open parliament in wet weather, unless faggots were first thrown into the deep pits and ruts. Foot and carriage-way had no other distinction than a row of posts; and if the passenger missed running his head against the low pent-house-lids, which here and there projected over the way, ten to one he came to some opening where a grim-headed and grinning spout sent down its torrents of water from the old-fashioned gabled building, and drenched him to the very skin. If he rushed out into the road, there

The roads of London were full of pits and hollows even in William and Anne’s time; and the coach-box was then a box indeed—a regular coach-repairer’s shop on a small scale; for to get through a long street in bad weather without either sticking fast, breaking down, turning over, or being turned over by some reckless carman, was something to boast about in those days. The coachman had then need to be a good hand at repairs, and was oftener seen tinkering up his vehicle than mounted on his box, which in time was covered with the hammer-cloth, to conceal the materials and implements which almost every hour were called into use. What a night-journey was in those old unpaved streets may be readily imagined, when it is known that there were not more than a thousand lamps to light the whole City—that these were only kept burning until midnight during one-half of the year, and the remainder of the season were never once lighted. Such was the London we now live in, a hundred years ago. Little link-boys then generally lay in wait at the corner of every street, either ready for a few pence to light the benighted wanderer home, or more probably to lead him astray, and extinguish the light at some dangerous spot, where the thieves he was associated with were in waiting.

Over thousands of troubles and trials rolled the rapid years; then the “Great Fire” broke out, and nearly every ancient landmark was destroyed; and now we have to grope our way through the twilight of dim records and a few rudely executed prints, to catch a glimpse of the old London in which our forefathers lived. This we shall endeavour to do as we thread our way through city and suburb; now glancing at the London of the present day, then turning the eye of the imagination to the ancient metropolis, which Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman have in succession traversed.

The old highway to London is that which the daring sea-kings poetically called “the road of the swans”—the broad bosom of the sea,—and then along the majestic river which leads to her grey old fortress, the Tower. But the railroad has ploughed up the country, and this ancient “silver pathway” is abandoned to commerce and pleasure-parties; so rapid is the transit from every point of the coast, that few care to thread the winding river when they can reach London by the railroads almost as direct as “the crow flies.” Such remains of ancient London as fall in our way we shall again glance at; and shall now commence our “Picturesque Sketches of London” by describing the most prominent landmark in the City—St. Paul’s Cathedral, together with a few of the most interesting objects in the neighbourhood.