BY HILAIRE BELLOC AUTHOR OF ‘THE PATH TO ROME’ T. N. FOULIS LONDON & EDINBURGH Published December 1912 Printed by Morrison & Gibb Limited , Edinburgh...

INTRODUCTION Through the flats that bound the North Sea and shelve into it imperceptibly, merging at last with the shallow flood, and re-emerging in distant sandbanks and less conspicuous shoals, run facing each other two waterways far inland, which are funnels and entries, as it were, scoured by the tide. Each has at the end of the tideway a narrow, placid, inland stream, from whence the broader, noisier sea part also takes its name. Each has been and will always be famous in the arms and in th

THE APPROACH UP RIVER There is perhaps no journey in the world in which the past and what now is and the links between them stand out more clearly stratified than a journey up the Thames upon the tide from the Sea-reach to the Pool. I will describe it; for it is upon a physical experience of this kind (I mean the seeing of history through the eye to the north and to the south of the narrowing river and the feel of the stream under one) that any historical essay upon the River of London must be b