Then, entering the historic period, I find this
London of ours a Roman city, stately with
temples to all the gods and goddesses of
Heathendom—a city where the mailed legions of
the Caesars paced sternly on the ramparts, and
held the native savages in awe within the
walls, or drove them forth into the outer
marshes. The scene shifting again, I behold
the narrow streets of Saxon London, with their
relics of Roman splendour lurking among the
rude timber houses of the Northmen. That, in
its turn, gives place to the mediaeval town—a
wild, beautiful dream of richly-carved and
ornamented houses, looking out between clustering
trees; of pinnacled cathedrals and churches; of
palaces and mansions; of streets crowded with
grave merchants and gay 'prentices, and flashing
with the brightly-coloured processions of
chivalry. Passing on into later times, as the
great drama unfolds itself, I find myself in the
gallant ruffling London of Shakespeare's day,
and of the age immediately succeeding: which
I watch with my mind's eye until I see it darken
under the gloom of Puritanism; spring forth
again into the glow and revelry of the Restoration;
become ghastly at the livid touch of the
Plague; sink, with a crash, and tumult, and
toppling of ancient towers, into the red and
roaring abyss of the Great Fire; rise once more
into power beneath the creative genius of Sir
Christopher Wren; take its noble stand for
Liberty in the days of 1688; sparkle in the
witty levity of the reigns of Anne and of the
first two Georges; and so pass through various
moods into the metropolis of our own times.
Such are the chief phases of our London drama
—a drama extending over nearly two thousand
years; and what a wealth of life, action, and
passion fills up the scenes! What tenderness
of love, and rage of terror; what beatings of
hot blood, long stilled in death; what plots and
conspiracies, hatched secretly, or suddenly
exploding in wrath and flame; what revolutions,
making kings and unmaking them; what crimes,
private and public, leaving a stain of blood
behind; what wrestling of individual man with
overwhelming circumstance; what summer
blossoming of genius, often from roots of bitterness,
and out of dusky places; what roystering in
taverns, and dalliance in palaces; what mysteries
of death, and dim suggestions of the something
after death; what joys, what agonies,
what despair!

Of all the cities of the modern world, none
can equal London and Paris for their vast,
manifold, and prolonged accumulation of human
experiences; and to the Englishman London
is necessarily the more interesting of the two.
To the bookish man, this sombre, prosaic
London is a territory of romance. For him
the treasured memories of the past remain
for ever. For him, the Arab maiden who married
Thomas à Becket's father still walks
through the alien streets, after her weary voyage
from the Holy Land, crying, " Gilbert,
Gilbert!" Jane Shore does penance in the
public ways, and Charles the Second talks
with Nelly in the Mall. Raleigh sits in the
Tower a prisoner, writing his History of the
World. The fires are alight in Smithfield,
and Charles the First steps out of that fatal
window at Whitehall upon the scaffold which
his own obstinate and untruthful nature had
prepared for him. Shakespeare acts again
at the Bankside, and the nine-and-twenty
pilgrims set out from the Tabard on that April
morning. Chaucer beats a friar in Fleet-street:
occasion of said beating unknown, but doubtless
impertinence on the part of the friar. The
poets gather about the throne of Ben, at the
Mermaid or the Devil. Rochester dispenses
quack medicines as an Italian mountebank in
Tower-street. The wits of the succeeding
generation flutter in the coffee-houses. Lillie the
perfumer sells the Tatler at that corner of
Beaufort-buildings and the Strand where once
more we find the sale of perfumes, but no
Tatler. Pope takes the water for Twickenham;
Addison writes the forthcoming Spectator, with
the help of a bottle of wine placed at each end
of the long room at Holland House; Steele
jests, writes love-letters to his wife, and
drinks, in defiance of the bailiffs; the bucks
and bloods and maccaronies sport their velvets
and their lace, their flowing wigs and their
gold-hilted swords, at Ranelagh and Vauxhall; and
Johnson—vast, burly, and awful—dominates in
Fleet-street, or, clinging to a post by Temple-
bar, wakes the echoes of St. Clement Danes
with sudden midnight laughter.

It is lucky, in these days of continual change
—of metropolitan railways plunging through
streets and squares, and knocking whole
neighbourhoods to pieces; of gigantic hotels
swallowing up a score or so of old houses—that
there are industrious compilers who preserve
for us the records of the past. Old London
will soon exist only in books, excepting for
a few such buildings as Westminster Abbey
and Westminster Hall. "London in Books,"
therefore, is every day becoming more and
more interesting. I, for one, am. grateful for
all collections which enable me to realise what
this vast city was, in times long gone by—times
distinguished from our own by many differences
of manners, of morals, and of architecture.

One of the pleasantest works of this kind
with which the public have recently been
favoured, is the Romance of London, by Mr.
John Timbs—three volumes of " strange stories,
scenes, and remarkable persons of the great
town." Mr. Timbs has already published a
book, under the title of Curiosities of London
(1855); but that is more purely antiquarian in
its character—this, more light and entertaining.
The work through which I now propose to
scamper is as charming a miscellany for
"dipping into" at leisure moments as any that could
be named. It is a compilation, certainly; but
a good compilation gives us the wit of many men
compacted. This collection of the Romance of
London contains the quintessence of a whole
circulating library of novels, historical and
domestic. Open it anywhere, and you find some