including as they do many of the noble old Halls of the City Companies, and private houses built by Wren. With the landing of William III. the Dutch style of regular windows and flat-topped uniform brick fronts was introduced, which gradually deteriorated from the comfortable quaint houses of Anne's time with the carved wooden porches which may be seen in Queen Anne's Gate, to the hideous monotony of Wimpole Street and Baker Street. Under the brothers Adam and their followers there was a brief revival of good taste, and all their works are deserving of study-masterly alike in proportion and in delicacy of detail. In fact, though the buildings of the British Classical revival were often cold and formal, they were never bad. Some people maintain that Art is dead in England, others. that it lives and grows daily. Certainly street architecture appeared to be in a hopeless condition, featureless, colourless, almost formless, till a few years ago, but, since then, there has been an unexpected resurrection. Dorchester House is a noble example of the Florentine style, really grandiose and imposing, and the admirable work of Norman Shaw at Lowther Lodge seems to have given an impulse to brick and terra-cotta decoration, which has been capitally followed out in several new houses in Cheapside, Oxford Street, Bond Street, and South Audley Street, and which is the beginning of a school of architecture for the reign of Victoria, as distinctive as that of Inigo Jones and Wren was for the time of the Stuarts. The more English architects study the brick cities of Northern Italy and learn that the best results are brought about by the simplest means, and that the greatest charm of a street is its irregularity, the more beautiful and picturesque will our London become. Besides the glorious collection in its National Gallery, London possesses many magnificent pictures in the great houses of its nobles, though few of these are shown to the public with the liberality displayed in continental cities. In the West End, however, people are more worth seeing than pictures, and foreigners and Americans will find endless sources of amusement in Rotten Row-in the Exhibitionsand in a levée at St. James's. "The Courts of two countries do not so differ from one another, as the Court and the City, in their peculiar ways of life and conversation. In short, the inhabitants of St. James's, notwithstanding they live under the same laws, and speak the same language, are a distinct people from those of Cheapside.”—Addison. "In the wonderful extent and variety of London, men of curious inquiry may see such modes of life as very few could ever imagine. . . The intellectual man is struck with it as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible."-Boswell's Life of Johnson. If a stranger wishes at once to gain the most vivid impression of the wealth, the variety, and the splendour of London, he should follow the economical course of "taking a penny boat "-embarking in a steamer-at Westminster Bridge, descend the Thames to London Bridge, and ascend the Monument. The descent of the river through London will give a more powerful idea of its constant movement of life than anything else can : the water covered with heavily laden barges and churned by crowded steamboats: the trains hissing across the iron railway bridges: the numerous bridges of stone with their concourse of traffic: the tall chimneys: the hundreds of church towers with the great dome of St. Paul's dominating the whole: the magnificent. embankment: the colossal Somerset House: the palaces on the shores jostled by buildings of such a different nature, weather-stained wooden sheds, huge warehouses from whose chasm-like windows great cranes are discharging merchandise, or raising it from the boats beneath: and each side artery giving a fresh glimpse into the bustle of a street. Throughout its long career, London has owed its chief prosperity, as it probably owed its existence, to the Thames, no longer here the "fishful river" of the old records, but ever the great inlet and outlet of the life of London," which easeth, adorneth, inricheth, feedeth, and fortifieth it." "As a wise king first settles fruitful peace In his own realms; and with their rich increase Sir J. Denham. The Thames is still the greatest highway in London, formerly it was the only highway; for even the best streets were comparatively mere byeways, where the men rode upon horseback, and the ladies were carried in horselitters. It is a proof of the constant use of the river even in the time of Charles II., that Pepys makes a point of mentioning in his Diary whenever he went to a place by land. The Watermen then used to keep time with their oars to songs, with the chorus "Heave and how, rumbelow," like the gondoliers at Venice. Howell, writing in 1645, says that the river Thames has not her fellow "if regard be had to those forests of masts that are perpetually upon her; the variety of smaller wooden bottoms playing up and down ; the stately palaces that are built upon both sides of her banks so thick; which made divers foreign ambassadors affirm that the most glorious sight, take land and water together, was to come upon a high tide from Gravesend, and shoot the bridge to Westminster." It is a proof of the little need there was to provide for any except water traffic, that except London Bridge there was no bridge over the river in London until Westminster Bridge was built in the middle of the last century. All the existing bridges date from the present century. Hackney coaches were not invented till the seventeenth century, and these excited the utmost fury in the minds of the Watermen, who had hitherto had the monopoly of all means of public locomotion. Taylor, the Water Poet, who died in 1654, writes "After a mask or a play at the Court, even the very earth quakes and trembles, the casements shatter, tatter, and clatter, and such a confused noise is made, so that a man can neither sleep, speak, hear, write, or eat his dinner or supper quiet for them." The first Hackney Coach stand, which existed till 1853, was established in front of St. Mary-le-Strand by Captain Baily in 1634, in which year also Strafford's Letters relate that "sometimes there are twenty of them together, which disperse up and down," and that "they and others are to be had everywhere as Watermen are to be had at the waterside." In the same year the Watermen complained vehemently to the king that the hackney coaches were "not confined to going north and south, but that their plying and carrying of people east and west, to and fro, in the streetes and places abutting upon the river doth utterly ruinate your petitioners." were limited. In June 1636 the coachmen petitioned to be made into a corporation, so that one hundred might have coaches and pay the king a hundred a year for the right. This number gradually increased, but has only been unlimited since 1833. In 1635 the hackney-coaches In their early existence hackney-coaches had not only the Watermen to contend with. Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham had brought back with them from Spain several Sedan chairs, and, though these at first excited the utmost contempt, people "loathing that men should be brought to as servile a condition as horses," their comparative safety on such rugged pavements as the streets were afflicted with in those days soon made them popular, and they continued to be the fashion for a century and a half. They were not, however, without their disadvantages. Swift describes the position of a London dandy in a shower "Box'd in a chair the beau impatient sits, While spouts run clattering o'er the roof by fits; The leather sounds;-he trembles from within." The discomforts of the streets, however, then made all means of locomotion unpleasant: thus Gay says "Let others in the jolting coach confide, Or, box'd within the chair, contemn the street,, And trust their safety to another's feet; Still let me walk." Not only are the pavements improved, and the lighted by gas, but we have no evura do VOL. I. |