Dr. Johnson’s Opinions of London. —“It is not in the showy evolution of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations, that the wonderful immensity of London consists.... The happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of where we now sit than in all the rest of the kingdom.... A man stores his mind [in London] better than anywhere else.... No place cures a man’s vanity

This book deals less with the London of the ghost-stories, the scratching impostor in Cock Lane, or the apparition of Parson Ford at the Hummums, than with the London consecrated by manifold traditions—a city every street and alley of which teems with interesting associations, every paving-stone of which marks, as it were, the abiding-place of some ancient legend or biographical story; in short, this London of the present haunted by the memories of the past. The slow changes of time, the swifter

INTRODUCTION. One day when Fuseli and Haydon were walking together, they reached the summit of a hill whence they could catch a glimpse of St. Paul’s. There was the grey dome looming out by fits through rolling drifts of murky smoke. The two little lion-like men stood watching “the sublime canopy that shrouds the city of the world.” [1] Now it spread and seethed like the incense from Moloch’s furnace; now it lifted and thinned into the purer blue, like the waft of some great sacrifice, or settle

TEMPLE BAR. Temple Bar, that old dingy gateway of blackened Portland stone which separates the Strand from Fleet Street, the City from the Shire, and the Freedom of the City of London from the Liberty of the City of Westminster, was built by Sir Christopher Wren in the year 1670, four years after the Great Fire, and ten after the Restoration. In earlier days there were at this spot only posts, rails, and a chain, as at Holborn, Smithfield, and Whitechapel. In later times, however, a house of tim

THE STRAND (SOUTH SIDE). Essex Street was formerly part of the Outer Temple, the western wing of the Knight Templars’ quarter. The outer district of these proud and wealthy Crusaders stretched as far as the present Devereux Court; those gentler spoilers, the mediæval lawyers, having extended their frontiers quite as far as their rooted-out predecessors. From the Prior and Canons of the Holy Sepulchre [35] it was transferred, in the reign of Edward II. to the Bishops of Exeter, who built a palace

SOMERSET HOUSE. That ambitious and rapacious noble the Protector Somerset, brother of Queen Jane Seymour, and maternal uncle of Edward VI., the owner of more than two hundred manors, [96] and who boasted that his own friends and retainers made up an army of ten thousand men, determined to build a palace in the Strand. For this purpose he demolished the parish church of St. Mary, and pulled down the houses of the Bishops of Worcester, Llandaff, and Lichfield. He also began to remove St. Margaret’

THE STRAND (SOUTH SIDE, CONTINUED). On the Thames, off Somerset House, was a timber shed built on a strong barge, and called “the Folly.” In William III.’s reign it was anchored higher up the stream, near the Savoy. Tom Brown calls it “a musical summer-house.” Its real name was “The Royal Diversion.” Queen Mary honoured it with her presence. [141] It was at first frequented by “persons of quality,” but latterly it became disreputable, and its orchestra and refreshment alcoves were haunted by thi

THE SAVOY. “Their leaders, John Ball, Jack Straw, and Wat Tyler, then marched through London, attended by more than twenty thousand men, to the palace of the Savoy , which is a handsome building on the road to Westminster, situated on the banks of the Thames, and belonging to the Duke of Lancaster. They immediately killed the porters, pressed into the house, and set it on fire.”— Froissart’s Chronicles. A minute’s walk down a turning on the south side of the Strand, and we are in the precinct of

FROM THE SAVOY TO CHARING CROSS. Old York House stood on the site of Buckingham and Villiers Streets. In ancient times, York House had been the inn of the Bishops of Norwich. Abandoned to the crown, King Henry VIII. gave the place to that gay knight Charles Brandon, the husband of his beautiful sister Mary, the Queen of France. When the Church rose again and resumed its scarlet pomp, the house was given to Queen Mary’s Lord Chancellor, Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, in exchange for Suffolk

THE NORTH SIDE OF THE STRAND, FROM TEMPLE BAR TO CHARING CROSS, WITH DIGRESSIONS ON THE SOUTH. The upper stratum of the Strand soil is composed of a reddish yellow earth, containing coprolites. Below this runs a seam of leaden-coloured clay, mixed with a few martial pyrites, calcined-looking lumps of iron and sulphur with a bright silvery fracture. A petition of the inhabitants of the vicinity of the King’s Palace at Westminster (8 Edward II.) represents the footway from Temple Bar to their neig

CHARING CROSS. On July 20, 1864, was laid the first stone of the great Thames Embankment, which now forms the wall of our river from Blackfriars to Westminster. A couple of flags fluttered lazily over the stone as a straggling procession of the members of the Metropolitan Board of Works moved down to the wooden causeway leading to the river. For two years about a thousand men were at work on it night and day. Iron caissons were sunk below the mud, deep in the gravel, and within ten feet of the c

ST. MARTIN’S LANE. Saint Martin’s Lane, extending from Long Acre to Charing Cross, was built before 1613, and then called the West Church Lane. The first church was built here by Henry VIII. The district was first called St. Martin’s Lane about 1617-18. [439] Sir Theodore Mayerne, physician to James I., lived on the west side of this lane. Mayerne was the godson of Beza, the great Calvinist reformer, and one of Henry IV.’s physicians. He came to England after that king’s death. He then became Ja

LONG ACRE AND ITS TRIBUTARIES. At the latter end of 1664, says Defoe, two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague at the Drury Lane end of Long Acre. Dr. Hodges, however, a greater authority than Defoe, who wrote fifty-seven years after the event, says merely that the pestilence broke out in Westminster, and that two or three persons dying, the frightened neighbours removed into the City, and there carried the contagion. He, however, distinctly states that the pest came to us from Holland,

DRURY LANE. The Roll of Battle Abbey tells us that the founder of the Drury family came into England with that brave Norman robber, the Conqueror, and settled in Suffolk. [526] From this house branched off the Druries of Hawstead, in the same county, who built Drury House in the time of Elizabeth. It stood a little behind the site of the present Olympic Theatre. Of another branch of the same family was that Sir Drue Drury, who, together with Sir Amias Powlett, had at one time the custody of Mary

ST. GILES’S. That ancient Roman military road (the Watling Street) came from Edgeware, and passing over Hyde Park and through St. James’s Park by Old Palace Yard, once the Wool Staple, it reached the Thames. Thence it was continued to Canterbury and the three great seaports. Another Roman road, the Via Trinobantica , which began at Southampton and ended at Aldborough, ran through London, crossed the Watling Street at Tyburn, and passed along Oxford Street. In latter times, says Dr. Stukeley, the

LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS. Lincoln’s Inn, originally belonging to the Black Friars before they removed Thames-ward, derives its name from Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, to whom it was given by Edward I., and whose town house or inn stood on the same site in the reign of Edward I. Earl Henry died in 1312, the year in which Gaveston was killed, and his monument was one of the stateliest in the old church. His arms are still those of the inn and of its tributaries, Furnival’s and Thavies inns. There is

“The West End seems to me one vast cemetery. Hardly a street but has in it a house once occupied by dear friends with whom I had daily intercourse: if I stopped and knocked now, who would know or take interest in me? The streets to me are peopled with shadows: the city is as a city of the dead. ”— Samuel Rogers. The Strand (South Side). — p. 25. “I often shed tears in the motley Strand for fulness of joy at such multitude of life.”— Charles Lamb’s Letters , vol. i. The Strand is three-quarters o