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Title: London in Modern Times

Author: Unknown

Release date: January 26, 2011 [eBook #35084]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON IN MODERN TIMES ***




Produced by Al Haines









LONDON

IN MODERN TIMES;


Or, Sketches of

THE ENGLISH METROPOLIS

DURING THE

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES.




New York

PUBLISHED BY CARLTON & PORTER,

SUNDAY-SCHOOL UNION, 200 MULBERRY-STREET.


1851




CONTENTS.

Chap.

       INTRODUCTION
   I.--LONDON UNDER THE FIRST TWO MONARCHS OF THE STUART DYNASTY
  II.--LONDON DURING THE CIVIL WARS
 III.--THE PLAGUE YEAR IN LONDON
  IV.--THE FIRE OF LONDON
   V.--FROM THE RESTORATION OF THE CITY TO THE CLOSE OF THE CENTURY
  VI.--LONDON DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
 VII.--LONDON DURING THE LATTER HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY




LONDON

IN MODERN TIMES.




INTRODUCTION.

This history of an old city opens many views into the realms of the
past, crowded with the picturesque, the romantic, and the
religious--with what is beautiful in intellect, sublime in feeling,
noble in character--and with much, too, the reverse of all this.
Buildings dingy and dilapidated, or tastelessly modernized, in which
great geniuses were born, or lived, or died, become, in connection with
the event, transformed into poetic bowers; and narrow dirty streets,
where they are known often to have walked, change into green alleys,
resounding with richer notes than ever trilled from bird on brake.
Tales of valor and suffering, of heroism and patience, of virtue and
piety, of the patriot's life and the martyr's death, crowd thickly on
the memory.  Nor do opposite reminiscences, revealing the footprints of
vice and crime, of evil passions and false principles, fail to arise,
fraught with salutary warnings and cautions.  The broad thoroughfare is
a channel, within whose banks there has been rolling for centuries a
river of human life, now tranquil as the sky, now troubled as the
clouds, gliding on in peace, or lashed into storms.

These dwelling-places of man are proofs and expressions of his
ingenuity, skill, and toil, of his social instincts and habits.  Their
varied architecture and style, the different circumstances under which
they were built, the various motives and diversified purposes which led
to their erection, are symbols and illustrations of the innumerable
forms, the many colored hues, the strange gradations of men's
condition, character, habits, tastes, and feelings.  Each house has its
own history--a history which in some cases has been running on since an
era when civilization wore a different aspect from what it does now.
What changeful scenes has many a dwelling witnessed!--families have
come and gone, people have been born and have died, obedient to the
great law--"the fashion of this world passeth away."  Those rooms have
witnessed the birth and departure of many, the death of the guilty
sinner or pardoned believer, the gay wedding and the gloomy funeral,
the welcome meeting of Christmas groups around the bright fireside, and
the sad parting of loved ones called to separate into widely divergent
paths.  Striking contrasts abound between the outward material aspect
and the inward moral scenery of those habitations.  In this house,
perhaps, which catches the passenger's eye by its splendor, through
whose windows there flashes the gorgeous light of patrician luxury, at
whose door lines of proud equipages drive up, on whose steps are
marshaled obsequious footmen in gilded liveries, there are hearts
pining away with ambition, envy, jealousy, fear, remorse, and agony.
In that humble cottage-like abode, on the other hand, contentment,
which with godliness is great gain, and piety, better than gold or
rubies, have taken up their home, and transformed it into a terrestrial
heaven.

All this applies to London, and gives interest to our survey of it as
we pass through its numerous streets; it clothes it with a poetic
character in the eyes of all gifted with creative fancy.  The poetry of
the city has its own charms as well as the poetry of the country.  The
history of London supplies abundant materials of the character now
described; indeed, they are so numerous and diversified that it is
difficult to deal with them.  The memorials of the mother city are so
intimately connected with the records of the empire, that to do justice
to the former would be to sketch the outline, and to exhibit most of
the stirring scenes and incidents of the latter.  London, too, is
associated closely with many of the distinguished individuals that
England has produced, with the progress of arts, of commerce and
literature, politics and law, religion and civilization; so that, as we
walk about it, we tread on classic ground, rich in a thousand
associations.  Its history is the history of our architecture, both
ecclesiastical and civil.  The old names and descriptions of its
streets, houses, churches, and other public edifices, aided by the few
vestiges of ancient buildings which have escaped the ravages of fire,
time, and ever-advancing alterations, bring before us a series of
views, exhibiting each order of design, from the Norman to the Tudor
era.  In the streets of London, too, may be traced the progress of
domestic building, from the plain single-storied house of the time of
Fitzstephen, to the lofty and many-floored mansion of the fifteenth
century, with its picturesque gables, ornamented front, and twisted
chimneys.  Then these melt away before other forms of taste and art.
In the days of Elizabeth, churches and dwellings become Italianized.
The architects under the Stuart dynasty make fresh innovation, till,
during the last century, skill and genius in this department reached
their culminating point.  Since that period a recurrence to the study
of old models has gradually been raising London to distinction, with
regard to the elegance and beauty of its architectural appearance.

The history of London is the history of our commerce.  Here is seen
gushing up, in very early times, that stream of industry, activity, and
enterprise, which from a rill has swelled into a river, and has borne
upon its bosom our wealth and our greatness, our civilization, and very
much of our liberty.

The London guilds and companies; the London merchant princes; the
London marts and markets; the London granaries for corn; the public
exchanges, built for the accommodation of money-brokers and traders
long before Gresham's time; the London port, wharfs, and docks, crowded
with ships of all countries, laden with treasures from all climes; the
London streets, many of which still bear the names of the trades to
which they were allotted, and the mercantile purposes for which they
were employed:--all these, which form so large a part of the materials,
and supply so great a portion of the scenes of London history, are
essentially commercial, and bring before us the progress of that
industrial spirit, which, with all its failings and faults, has
contributed so largely to the welfare and happiness of modern society.

The history of London is a history of English literature.  Time would
fail to tell of all the memorials of genius with which London abounds;
memorials of poets, philosophers, historians, and divines, who have
there been born, and lived, and studied, and toiled, and suffered, and
died.  No spot in the world, perhaps, is so rich in associations
connected with the history of great minds.  There is scarcely one of
the old streets through which you ramble, or one of the old churches
which you enter, but forthwith there come crowding over the mind of the
well-informed, recollections of departed genius, greatness, or
excellence.

The history of London is the history of the British constitution and
laws.  There thicken round it most of the great political conflicts
between kings and barons, and lords and commons; between feudalism and
modern liberty; between the love of ancient institutions and the spirit
of progress, from which, under God, have sprung our civil government
and social order.

The history of London is the history of our religion, both in its
corrupted and in its purified forms.  Early was it a grand seat of
Romish worship; numerous were its religious foundations in the latter
part of the mediæval age.  Here councils have been held, convocations
have assembled, controversies were waged, and truth exalted or
depressed.  Smithfield and St. Paul's Churchyard are inseparably
associated with the Reformation.  The principles proclaimed from the
stone pulpit of the one could not be destroyed by the fires that blazed
round the stakes of the other.  The history of the Protestant
Establishment ever since is involved in that of our city; places
connected with its grand events, its advocates, and its ornaments, are
dear to the hearts of its attached children; while other spots in
London, little known to fame, are linked to the memory of the Puritans,
and while reverently traced out by those who love them, are regarded as
hallowed ground.

In London, too, have flourished many of the excellent of the earth; men
who, amidst the engrossing cares and distracting tumults of a large
metropolis, have, like Enoch, walked with God, and leavened, by virtue
of their piety and prayers, the masses around them.  Here also have
flourished, and still flourish, those great religious institutions,
which have made known to the remotest parts of the earth the glad
tidings of the gospel, that "God so loved the world, that he gave his
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish,
but have everlasting life"--truths more precious than the merchandise
of silver, and the gain whereof is greater than pure gold.

Some of the early chapters of London history we have already
written;[1] we have given some sketches of its scenes and fortunes,
from the time when it was founded by the Romans to what are called,
with more of fiction's coloring than history's faithfulness, "the
golden days of good queen Bess."  We now resume the story, and proceed
to give some account of London during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.



[1] See "London in the Olden Time," No. 492 Youth's Library.




CHAPTER I.

LONDON UNDER THE FIRST TWO MONARCHS OF THE STUART DYNASTY.

London was hugely growing and swelling on all sides when Elizabeth was
on the throne, as may be seen from John Stow, from royal orders and
municipal regulations.  Desperately frightened were our fathers lest
the population should increase beyond the means of support, lest it
should breed pestilence or cause famine.  But their efforts to repress
the size of the then infant leviathan, so far as they took effect, only
kept crowded together, within far too narrow limits, the
ever-increasing number of the inhabitants of the city, thus promoting
disease, one of the greatest evils they wished to check.  In spite of
all restrictions, however, the growth of population, together with the
impulses of industry and enterprize, would have their own way, and
building went on in the outskirts in all directions.  James imitated
Elizabeth in her prohibitions, and the people imitated their
predecessors in the disregard of them.  The king was soon obliged to
give way, so far as to extend the liberties of the city; and in the
fifth year of his reign he granted a new charter, embracing within the
municipal circuit and jurisdiction the extra-mural parishes of Trinity,
near Aldgate-street, St. Bartholomew, Little St. Bartholomew,
Blackfriars, Whitefriars, and Cold Harbor, Thames-street.  These grants
were confirmed by Charles I., whose charter also enclosed within the
city boundaries both Moorfields and Smithfield.  These places rapidly
lost more and more of their rural appearance, and became covered in the
immediate vicinity of the old walls with a network of streets.  But
London as it appears on the map of that day, was still a little affair,
compared with its subsequent enormous bulk.  Pancras, Holloway,
Islington, Kentish Town, Hampstead, St. John's Wood, Paddington,
Kilburn, and Tottenham Court, were widely separated from town by rural
walks; these "ways over the country," as a poet of the day describes
them, not being always safe for travelers to cross.  St. Giles's was
still "in the fields," and Charing Cross looked towards the west, upon
the fair open parks of the royal domain.  But the Strand was becoming a
place of increasing traffic, and the houses on both sides were
multiplying fast.  So valuable did sites become, even in the beginning
of the seventeenth century, that earls and bishops parted with portions
of their domains in that locality for the erection of houses, and
Durham Place changed its stables into an Exchange in 1608.

Of the architecture which came into fashion in the reign of James I.,
three noble specimens remain in London and the neighborhood.
Northumberland House, which stands on the spot once occupied by the
hospital of St. Mary, finally dissolved at the Reformation, was erected
by Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, son of the poet Surrey, and
originally called from him Southampton House; he died in 1614.  It
afterwards took the name of Suffolk House, from its coming into the
possession of the earl of Suffolk; its present name was given on the
marriage of the daughter of Suffolk with Algernon Percy, tenth earl of
Northumberland.  It was built with three sides, forming with the river,
which washed its court and garden, a magnificent quadrangle.  Jansen is
the reputed architect, but the original front is considered to have
been designed by Christmas, who rebuilt Aldersgate about the same time.
The fourth side was afterwards built by the earl of Northumberland,
from a design by Inigo Jones.  Holland House, at Kensington, now
occupied by Lord Holland, belongs to the same period, being erected in
1607 by Sir Walter Cope, and enlarged afterwards by the Earl of
Holland, from plans prepared by the illustrious architect just named.
These structures are worthy of examination.  They evince some lingering
traits of the Tudor Gothic, which flourished in the middle of the
former age, but exhibit the predominance of that Italian taste which
had been introduced in the reign of Elizabeth, and which continued to
prevail till it ended in the corrupt and debased style of the last
century.  The Banqueting House at Whitehall is a more imposing and
splendid relic, and presents an instance of the complete triumph of the
Italian school of architecture over its predecessors.  It was designed
by Inigo Jones in the maturity of his genius, and forms only a small
part of a vast regal palace, of which the plans are still preserved.
The exterior buildings were to have measured eight hundred and
seventy-four feet on the east and west sides, and one thousand one
hundred and fifty-two on the north and south.  The Banqueting House was
finished in 1619, and cost £17,000.  It is curious to learn, that the
great "architect's commission" amounted to no more than 8_s._ 1_d._ a
day as surveyor, and £46 a year for house-rent, a clerk, and other
expenses.  It may be added, that further specimens of this architecture
and sculpture of that period can be seen in some parts of the Charter
House.

Generally, it may be observed, London retained much of its ancient
architectural appearance till it was destroyed by the fire.  Old public
buildings were still in existence; Gothic churches lifted up their gray
towers and spires, and vast numbers of the houses of the nobility and
rich merchants of a former age displayed their picturesque fronts, and
opened their capacious hospitable halls; while the new habitations of
common citizens were usually built in the slightly modified style of
previous times, with stories projecting one above another, adorned with
oak carvings or plastic decorations.  Royal injunctions were repeatedly
issued to discontinue this sort of building, and to erect houses of
stone or brick.  A writer of the day affords many peeps into the state
of London at the time we now refer to.  He describes ladies passing
through the Strand in their coaches to the china houses or the
Exchange.  He tells of 'a rare motion, or puppet-show,' to be seen in
Fleet-street, and of one representing 'Nineveh, with Jonah and the
whale,' at Fleet-bridge.  Indeed, this was the thoroughfare or the
grand place for the quaint exhibitions of the age.  Cold Harbor is
described as a resort for spendthrifts, Lothbury abounded with
coppersmiths, Bridge-row was rich in rabbit-skins, and Panyer's-alley
in tripe.  So nearly did the houses on opposite sides of the way
approach together, that people could hold a _tête à tête_ in a low
whisper from each other's windows across the street.  From another
source we learn that dealers in fish betook themselves to the Strand,
and there blocked up the highway.  "For divers years of late certain
fishmongers have erected and set up fish-stalls in the middle of the
street in the Strand, almost over against Denmark House, all which were
broken down by special commission this month of May, 1630--lest, in
short space, they might grow from stalls to sheds, and then to
dwelling-houses, as the like was in former times in Old Fish-street,
and in St. Nicholas's shambles, and other places."[1]

It may be added, that it was still, at this period, the custom for
persons of a similar trade to occupy the same locality.  "Then," says
Maitland, in his History of London, "it was beautiful to behold the
glorious appearances of goldsmiths' shops on the south row of
Cheapside, which in a continued course reached from Old Change to
Bucklersbury, exclusive of four shops only of other trades in all that
space."  This "unseemliness and deformity," as his majesty was pleased
to call it in an order of council in 1629, greatly provoked the royal
displeasure; yet in spite of efforts to the contrary from that high
quarter, not only did the four obnoxious tradesmen keep their ground,
but a few years after the king had to complain of greater
irregularities.  Four and twenty houses, he affirmed, were inhabited by
divers tradesmen, to the beclouding of the glory of the goldsmiths, and
the disturbance of his majesty's love of order and uniformity.  He went
so far as to threaten the imprisonment of the alderman of the ward, if
he would not see to this matter, and remove the offenders.  It is said
of Charles V., that after he resigned his crown, he amused himself by
trying to make several clocks keep the same time, and on the failure of
his experiment observed, that if he could not accomplish that, no
wonder he had not succeeded in bringing his numerous subjects into a
state of ecclesiastical conformity.  Charles I. might, from his
inability to make men of the same trade live together in one row, have
learned a similar lesson.  This trifling conflict exhibits no unapt
similitude of one of the aspects of the great evil conflict, the edge
of which he was then approaching.  Other street irregularities were
loudly complained of by the lord mayor.  Notwithstanding the numerous
laws made to restrain them from so doing, bakers, butchers, poulterers,
and others, would persist in encumbering the public thoroughfares with
their stalls and vendibles.

London, during the reign of the first James and Charles, was a sphere
of commercial activity.  Monopolies and patents did, it is true,
greatly cripple the movements of trade.  Nothing scarcely could be done
without royal permission, for which large sums of money had to be paid.
It was complained of, that "every poor man that taketh in but a horse
on a market-day, is presently sent up for to Westminster and sued,
unless he compound with the patentees (of inns) and all ancient
innkeepers; if they will not compound, they are presently sued at
Westminster for enlargement of their house, if they but set up a post,
or a little hovel, more than of ancient was there."  Yet the very
patents sought and granted for exclusive trades and manufactures,
though tending to diminish commerce by fettering it, are proofs of
demand and consumption, and of the industrial energy of the age.  These
monopolies were bestowed on courtiers and noblemen, but still, no
doubt, some of the citizens of London were employed in their
management.  Of the wealth yielded by commerce, in spite of these
restrictions, ample proof was given in the supplies yielded repeatedly
to the exorbitant demands of the crown.  Both James and Charles knew
what it was to have an empty exchequer, and in their emergencies they
usually repaired to the good city of London as to a perfect California.
Loan on loan was obtained.  These demands, like leeches, sucked till
one would have supposed they had drained the body municipal; but soon
its veins appear to have refilled, and the circulation of wealth went
briskly on.  One of the most remarkable enterprises in the reign of
James I. was that of Sir Hugh Myddelton, who in 1608 began, and in 1613
finished his project of providing London with water, by means of the
canal commonly called the New River.  The importance of this laborious
and expensive achievement, which reflects great honor on its
originator, can be estimated sufficiently only after remembering how
difficult, if not impossible almost, it was before to obtain a large
supply of the indispensible element in a state at all approaching
purity.  The opening of the river and the filling of the basin formed a
very splendid gala scene, the laborers being clothed in goodly apparel,
with green caps, and at a given signal opening the sluices, with the
sound of drums and trumpets, and the acclamations of the people; the
lord mayor and corporation being present to behold the ceremony.

In the train of wealth came indulgence and luxury.  Sad lamentations
were expressed on account of the extravagance of the upper classes, who
spent their money in the city on "excess of apparel, provided from
foreign parts to the enriching of other nations, and the unnecessary
consumption of the treasures of the realm, and on other vain delights
and expenses, even to the wasting of their estates."  London, during
the sitting of the law courts, seems to have been deluged with people,
who came up from the country, and vied with each other in their
expensive mode of living; so that, at the Christmas of 1622, the
monarch, with a very paternal care of his subjects, ordered the country
nobility and gentry forthwith to leave the metropolis, and go home and
keep hospitality in the several counties.  St. Paul's Cathedral was
desecrated at this time, by its middle walk being made a lounging and
loitering place for the exhibition of extravagant fashions, and for
indulgence in all kinds of pursuits.  There the wealthy went to exhibit
their riches, and the needy to make money, the dissolute to enjoy their
pleasures, the mere idler to while away his time.  Bishop Earle, in his
Microcosmographic, published in 1628, gives the following description
of the place, and thereby throws light on the habits of the Londoners:
"It is the land's epitome, or you may call it the lesser isle of Great
Britain.  It is more than this; the world's map, which you may here
discern in its perfectest motion justling and turning.  It is a heap of
stones, and men with a vast confusion of languages; and, were the
steeple not sanctified, nothing liker Babel.  The noise in it is like
that of bees, a strange humming or buz mixed of walking, tongues, and
feet.  It is a kind of still roar or loud whisper.  It is the great
exchange of all discourse, and no business whatsoever but is here
stirring and a-foot.  It is the synod of all pates politic, jointed and
laid together in the most serious posture, and they are not half so
busy at the parliament.  It is the market of young lecturers, whom you
may cheapen here at all rates and sizes.  It is the general mint of all
famous lies, which are here, like the legends of popery, first coined
and stamped in the church.  All inventions are emptied here, and not
few pockets.  The best sign of a temple in it is, that it is the
thieves' sanctuary, which rob more safely in a crowd than a wilderness,
while every searcher is a bush to hide them.  The visitants are all men
without exception, but the principal inhabitants and possessors are
state knights and captains out of service--men of long rapiers and
breeches, which after all turn merchants here and traffic for news.
Some make it a preface to their dinner, and travel for a stomach; but
thrifty men make it their ordinary, and board here very cheap."

Riding about in coaches, as well as walking in smart array about St.
Paul's, was a method of display which those who could afford it were
very fond of.  Hackney coaches made their appearance in 1625, and so
greatly did they multiply, that the king, the queen, and the nobility,
could hardly get along; while, to add to the annoyance, the pavements
were broken up, and provender much advanced in price.  "Wherefore,"
says a proclamation, "we expressly command and forbid that no hackney
or hired coaches be used or suffered in London, Westminster, or the
suburbs thereof, except they be to travel at least three miles out of
the same.  And also that no person shall go in a coach in the said
streets, except the owner of the coach shall constantly keep up four
able horses for our service when required."

The increasing wealth of the citizens made them covetous of honor, and
king James, to replenish his exhausted coffers, was willing to sell
them titles of knighthood.  The attainment of these distinctions led to
some curious displays of human vanity, and excited those mean
jealousies which our fallen and debase nature is so apt to cherish.  It
was a question keenly agitated among the civic dignitaries and their
ladies,--Whether a knight commoner should rank before an untitled
alderman--whether a junior alderman just knighted should take
precedence of a senior brother, without that distinction, who had long
passed the chair?  A marshal's court was at length held to decide the
matter, and it was arranged that precedence in the city should be
attached to the aldermanic office, rather than the knightly name--an
instance of flattering respect to municipal rank.

While the wealthier classes were closely pressing on the heels of their
more aristocratic neighbors, the humbler orders were, in their own way,
seeking to imitate their superiors.  The pride of dress was generally
indulged in, and manifested, as is always the case, in times and
countries distinguished by mercantile activity.  To check extravagance
in this respect, sumptuary laws were adopted, after the fashion of
former ages, and with a like unsuccessful result.  With tailor-like
minuteness, the dress of the inferior citizens was prescribed.  No
apprentice was to wear a hat which cost more than five shillings, or a
neck-band that was not plainly hemmed.  His doublet was to be made of
Kersey fustian, sackcloth, canvas, or leather, of two shillings and
sixpence a yard, and under; his stockings to be of woolen, and his hair
to be cut short and decent.  Like minute directions were issued
relative to the attire of servant maids.  Linen was to be their
clothing, and that not to exceed five shillings an ell.

Pageants, which had been so common in the days of the Tudors, reached
an unexampled stage of extravagant and absurd display under the first
two monarchs of the house of Stuart.  Even grave lawyers, including the
great Mr. Selden himself, took part in getting up these exhibitions;
and a particular account is given of a masquerade of their devising,
which was performed at the expense of the inns of court, before king
Charles, in 1633.

Liveries, and dresses of gold and silver, glittering in the light of
torches, horses richly caparisoned, and chariots sumptuously fitted up,
were set off by contrast with beggars and cripples, who were introduced
in the procession, riding on jaded hacks.  Very odd devices,
illustrative of the taste of the period, and of the way in which
satirical feelings found vent, through the medium of emblematical
characters, were combined with the other quaint arrangements of this
show, such as boys disguised as owls and other birds, and persons
representing the patented monopolists, who were extremely unpopular.  A
man was harnessed with a _bit_ in his mouth, to denote a projector who
wished to have the exclusive manufacture of that article; another, with
a bunch of carrots on his head and a capon on his wrist, caricatured
some one who wanted to engross the trade of fattening birds upon these
vegetables.  The object was to convey to the king an idea of the
ridiculous nature of many of the monopolies then conferred.  All sorts
of pageants and shows, with a dramatic cast in them, were exhibited at
Whitehall under royal patronage, and filled the edifice with revelry
and riot at Christmas and other festivals.  The genius of Inigo Jones
was for many years chained down to the invention of scenery and
decoration for these trifles, while Ben Jonson exercised his muse in
writing verses and dialogues for the masquerades.

At a later period of the reign of Charles I., the year 1638, there was
much excitement produced in London by the grand entry of Mary
de'Medici, mother of the queen Henrietta, upon which occasion a
spectacle of unusual grandeur was exhibited.  A very full account of
this was published by the Historiographer of France, the Sieur de la
Sierre.

After detailing the order of procession, reporting the speeches
delivered, and describing the rooms and furniture of the palace, and
the manner of the reception of the queen-mother by her daughter
Henrietta, the author dwells with wonderful delight on the public
illuminations and fireworks on the evening of the day: "For the
splendor of an infinite number of fireworks, joined to that of as many
stars, which shone forth at the same time, both the heavens and the
earth seemed equally filled with light.  The smell had all its
pleasures of the cinnamon and rosemary wood, which were burning in a
thousand places, and the taste was gratified by the excellence of all
sorts of wine, which the citizens vied with each other in presenting to
passengers, in order to drink together to their majesties' health."
"Represent to yourself that all the streets of this great city were so
illuminated by an innumerable number of fires which were lighted, and
by the same quantity of flambeaux with which they had dressed the
balconies and windows, and from afar off to see all this light
collected into one single object, one could not consider it but with
great astonishment."

These festive transactions on the surface of London society little
indicated the awful convulsion that was near at hand.  In the
chronicles of London pageantry, the waters look calm and bright, and no
stormy petrel flaps his wing as an omen of an approaching tempest.  But
a time of controversy and confusion was near.  A great struggle was
impending, both political and religious.  What has just been noticed of
court and civic life was but

  "The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below."


In some departments of London history, however, premonitions might have
been discovered of an approaching crisis.  The anti-papal feelings of
the people had been aroused by the treaties between James and the king
of Spain, and the projected marriage of prince Charles with the
infanta.  So turbulent was popular emotion on this subject, that on one
occasion the Spanish ambassador was assailed in the streets.  When, in
the reign of Charles I., mass was celebrated in the ambassador's
chapel, and English papists were allowed to join in the ceremony, an
attack was made upon the house of the embassy, and the mob threatened
to pull it down.  But a far deeper and stronger impression was produced
upon the minds of sound Protestants by the proceedings of archbishop
Laud and his friends.  The consecration of St. Catherine Cree church,
on the north side of Leadenhall-street, was attended by ceremonies so
closely approximating to those of Rome, as to awaken in a large portion
of the clergy and laity most serious apprehension.  The excitements of
later times on similar grounds find their adequate type and
representation in the troubled thoughts and agitated bosoms of a
multitude of Londoners in the early part of the year 1631.  It was a
remarkable era in the ecclesiastical annals of London.  The church
having been lately repaired, Laud, then bishop of London, came to
consecrate it.  "At his approach to the west door," says Rushworth,
"some that were prepared for it cried, with a loud voice, 'Open, open,
ye ever-lasting doors, that the king of glory may enter in.'  And
presently the doors were opened, and the bishop, with three doctors and
many other principal men, went in, and immediately falling down upon
his knees, with his eyes lifted up, and his arms spread abroad, uttered
these words, 'This place is holy, this ground is holy--in the name of
the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I pronounce it holy.'  Then he took up
some of the dust, and threw it up into the air several times, in his
going up towards the church.  When they approached near to the rail and
communion table, the bishop bowed towards it several times, and
returning they went round the church in procession, saying the
hundredth Psalm, after that the nineteenth."  Then cursing those who
should profane the place, and blessing those who built it up and
honored it, he consecrated, after sermon, the sacrament in the manner
following: "As he approached the communion table, he made several lowly
bowings, and coming up to the side of the table, where the bread and
wine were covered, he bowed several times, and then, after the reading
of many prayers, he came near the bread, and gently lifted up the
corner of the napkin wherein the bread was laid; and when he beheld the
bread he laid it down again, flew back a step or two, bowed three
several times towards it, then he drew near again, and opened the
napkin, and bowed as before.  Then he laid his hand on the cup which
was full of wine, with a cover upon it, which he let go, went back, and
bowed thrice toward it; then he came near again, and lifted up the
cover of the cup, looked into it, and seeing the wine he let fall the
cover again, retired back, and bowed as before: then he received the
sacrament, and gave it to many principal men; after which many prayers
being said, the solemnity of the consecration ended."  The bishop of
London consecrated St. Giles's church in the same manner, and on his
translation to Canterbury, studiously restored Lambeth chapel, with its
Popish paintings and ornaments.  The displeasure awakened by these
superstitious formalities and Popish tendencies was not confined to men
of extreme opinions.  The moderate, amiable, but patriotic Lord
Falkland, the brightest ornament on the royalist side in the civil war,
sympathized with the popular displeasure, and thus pertinently
expressed himself in a speech he made in the House of Commons: "Mr.
Speaker, to go yet further, some of them have so industriously labored
to deduce themselves from Rome, that they have given great suspicion
that in gratitude they desire to return thither, or at least to meet it
half-way; some have evidently labored to bring in an English, though
not a Roman Popery.  I mean not only the outside and dress of it, but
equally absolute, a blind dependence of the people on the clergy, and
of the clergy on themselves; and have opposed the papacy beyond the
seas, that they might settle one beyond the water, (_trans
Thamesin_--beyond the Thames--at Lambeth.)  Nay, common fame is more
than ordinarily false, if none of them have found a way to reconcile
the opinions of Rome to the preferments of England, and be so
absolutely, directly, and cordially Papists, that it is all that £1,500
a year can do to keep them from confessing it."  This fondness for
Romish ceremonies, and these notions of priestly supremacy, cherished
and expressed by Laud and his party, were connected with the intolerant
treatment of those ministers who were of the Puritan stamp.  Some of
them were silenced and even imprisoned.  Mr. Burton, the minister of
Friday-street, preached and published two sermons in the year 1633
against the late innovations.  For this he was brought before the High
Commission Court, and imprisoned.

About the same time, Prynne, a barrister of Lincoln's Inn, was
imprisoned, and had his ears cut off, for writing against plays and
masks; and Dr. Bastwick was also confined in jail for writing a book,
in which he denied the divine right of the order of bishops above
presbyters.  These men were charged with employing their hours of
solitude in the composition of books against the bishops and the
spiritual courts, and for this were afresh arraigned before the
arbitrary tribunal of the Star Chamber.  "I had thought," said lord
Finch, looking at the prisoner, "Mr. Prynne had no ears, but methinks
he has ears."  This caused many of the lords to take a closer view of
him, and for their better satisfaction the usher of the court turned up
his hair, and showed his ears; upon the sight whereof the lords were
displeased they had been no more cut off, and reproached him.  "I hope
your honors will not be offended," said Mr. Prynne; "pray God give you
ears to hear."[2]  The sentence passed was, that the accused should
stand in the pillory, lose their ears, pay £5,000, and be imprisoned
for life.  When the day for executing it came, an immense crowd
assembled in Palace-yard, Westminster.  It was wished that the crowd
should be kept off.  "Let them come," cried Burton, "and spare not that
they may learn to suffer."  "Sir," cried a woman, "by this sermon God
may convert many unto him."  "God is able to do it, indeed," he
replied.  At the sight of the sufferer, a young man standing by turned
pale.  "Son," said Burton, "what is the matter? you look so pale; I
have as much comfort as my heart can hold, and if I had need of more, I
should have it."  A bunch of flowers was given to Bastwick, and a bee
settled on it.  "Do you not see this poor bee?" he said, "she hath
found out this very place to suck sweet from these flowers, and cannot
I suck sweetness in this very place from Christ?"  "Had we respected
our liberties," said Prynne, "we had not stood here at this time; it
was for the general good and liberties of you all, that we have now
thus far engaged our own liberties in this cause.  For did you know how
deeply they have encroached on your liberties, if you knew but into
what times you are cast, it would make you look about, and see how far
your liberty did lawfully extend, and so maintain it."  The knife, the
saw, the branding-iron, were put to work.  Bastwick's wife received her
husband's ears in her lap, and kissed them.  Prynne cried out to the
man who hacked him, "Cut me, tear me, I fear not thee--I fear the fire
of hell, not thee."  Burton fainting with heat and pain, cried out,
"'Tis too hot to last."  It _was_ too hot to last.

Sympathy with the principles of these Puritan sufferers pervaded, to a
great extent, the population of London.  Side by side with, but in
stern contrast to, the gay merry-makings and pageants of the Stuart
age, there lay a deep, earnest, religious spirit at work, mingling with
political excitement, and strengthening it.  The Puritan preachers of a
former age had been popular in London.  Their sentiments had tended
greatly to mould into a corresponding form the opinions, habits, and
feelings of a subsequent generation.  An anti-papal spirit, a love of
evangelical truth, a desire for simplicity in worship, a deep reverence
for the Lord's day, and a strict morality, characterized this
remarkable race of men.  The strange doings of Archbishop Laud, the
doctrines they heard in some of the parish churches, the profanation of
the Sabbath, and the profligacy of the times, filled these worthies
with deep dismay, and vexed their righteous souls.  Boldly did they
testify against such things; and when the Book of Sports came out, the
magistrates of London had so much of the Puritan spirit in them, that
they decidedly set their faces against the infamous injunctions, and
went so far as to stop the king's carriage while proceeding through the
city during service-time.  King James, enraged at this, swore that "he
had thought there had been no kings in England but himself," and sent a
warrant to the mayor, commanding that the vehicle should pass; to which
his lordship, with great firmness and dignity, replied, "While it was
in my power I did my duty, but that being taken away by a higher power,
it is my duty to obey."  In the reign of Charles, the chief magistrate
issued very stringent orders in reference to the Sabbath.

The proceedings of the Star Chamber, its barbarous punishments and
mutilations, with the accompaniments of fines and captivity, for
conscientious adherence to what was considered the path of duty, galled
the spirits and roused the indignation of many a Londoner.  The
citizens went home from the public execution of iniquitous sentences,
from the sight of victims pilloried and mangled for their adherence to
virtuous principle, with a deep disquietude of soul, which swelled to
bursting as they reflected on the tragedies they had witnessed.  The
avenging hand of Providence on injustice and oppression was about to be
manifested, visiting national iniquities with those internal calamities
and convulsions which so long afflicted the land.  A significant scene,
prophetic of the new order of things, took place in London in the year
1640, just after the opening of the Long Parliament.  Prynne, Burton,
and Bastwick, were restored to liberty.  Crowds went forth to meet
them.  "When they came near London," says Clarendon, "multitudes of
people of several conditions, some on horseback and others on foot, met
them some miles from town, very many having been a day's journey; so
they were brought about two o'clock of the afternoon in at Charing
Cross, and carried into the city by above ten thousand persons, with
boughs, and flowers, and herbs in the way as they passed, making great
noise and expressions of joy for their deliverance and return; and in
these acclamations mingling loud and virulent exclamations against
those who had so cruelly persecuted such godly men."  The scarred
faces, the mutilated ears of the personages thus honored, would tell a
tale of suffering and heroism, sure to appeal to the popular sympathy,
and turn it in a stream of violent indignation against the mad
oppressors.  What followed we shall see in the next chapter.  Meanwhile
we may remark, that much of what has now been detailed furnishes a
singular historical parallel to the events of our own times, and
illustrates the observation of Solomon of old: "Is there anything
whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old
time, which was before us."  Eccles. i, 10.  We have lived in the
nineteenth century to witness the revival of superstitious mummeries
and popish errors; and taught by the past, the true Christian will
earnestly pray that they may be extirpated without the recurrence of
those awful calamities, of which their introduction in former times
proved the precursor.  Meanwhile may each reader remember, that an
obligation is laid upon him to counteract these deviations from
Scriptural truth by maintaining that unceremonial and spiritual
religion which Christ taught the woman of Samaria, and by cultivating
that vital faith which rests on Him alone for acceptance, while it
works by love, purifies the heart, and overcomes the world!



[1] Howes, edit. 1631.

[2] State Trials.  Guizot's English Revolution, page 64.




CHAPTER II.

LONDON DURING THE CIVIL WARS.

Charles I. unfurled his standard at Nottingham, in the month of August,
1642, and staked his crown and life on the issue of battle; a high wind
beat down the flag, an evil omen, as it was deemed by some who saw it,
and a symbol, as it proved, of the result of the unnatural conflict.
Sadly was England's royal standard stained before the fighting ended.
London took part at the beginning with the parliament.  Its Puritan
tendencies; its awakened indignation at the assaults made by misguided
monarchs and their ministers on conscientious, religious, brave-hearted
men; its long observation of Stafford's policy, which had roused the
displeasure of the citizens, and led to riots; its jealousy of the
constitution being violated and imperiled by the arbitrary proceedings
of Charles, especially by his attempt to reign without parliaments;
and, added to these, a selfish, but natural resentment at the
exorbitant pecuniary fines and forfeitures with which it had been
visited in the exercise of royal displeasure, contributed to fix London
on the side of those who had taken their stand against the king.  One
can easily imagine the busy political talk going on at that time in all
kinds of dwellings and places of resort--the eager expectancy with
which citizens waited for news--the haste with which reports, often
exaggerated, passed from lip to lip--the sensation produced by decided
acts on either side; as when, for example, Charles went down to the
House of Commons, demanding the arrest of five obnoxious members, and
when the House declared itself incapable of dissolution save by its own
will--the hot and violent controversies that would be waged between
citizens of opposite political and religious opinions--the separation
of friends--the divisions in families--the reckless violence with which
some plunged into the strife, and the hard and painful moral necessity
which impelled others to take their side--the mean, low, selfish, or
fanatical motives which influenced some, and the high, pure, and
patriotic principles which moved the breasts of others--the godless
zeal of multitudes, and the firm faith and wrestling prayer that
sustained not a few.  These varied elements, grouped and arranged by
the imagination upon the background of the scenery of old London, in
the first half of the seventeenth century, form a picture of deep and
solemn interest.

After the battle of Edgehill, in October, Charles marched towards
London, anxious to possess himself of that citadel of the empire.  So
near did the royal army come, that many of the citizens were scared by
the sound of Prince Rupert's cannon.  The horrors of a siege or
invasion of a city, penned in by lines of threatening troops, expected
every hour to burst the gates or scale the walls--the spectacle of
soldiers scouring the streets, slaying the peaceful citizen, pillaging
his property, and burning his dwelling--such were the anticipations
that presented themselves before the eyes of the Londoners in that
memorable October, creating an excitement in all ranks, which the
leaders of the popular cause sought to turn to practical account.

Eight speeches spoken in Guildhall on Thursday night, October 27th,
1642, have come down to us; and as we look on the old reports, which
have rescued these utterances from the oblivion into which the earnest
talking of many busy tongues at that time has fallen, we seem to stand
within the walls of that civic gathering-place, amidst the dense mass
of excited citizens assembled at eventide, their faces gleaming through
the darkness, with the reflected light of torches and lamps, and to
hear such sentences as the following from the lips of Lord Saye and
Sele, whose words were applauded by the multitude, till the building
rings again with the echo: "This is now not a time for men to think
with themselves, that they will be in their shops and get a little
money.  In common dangers let every one take his weapons in his hand;
let every man, therefore, shut up his shop, let him take his musket,
offer himself readily and willingly.  Let him not think with himself,
Who shall pay me? but rather think this, I will come forth to save the
kingdom, to serve my God, to maintain his true religion, to save the
parliament, to save this noble city."  The speaker knew what kind of
men he was appealing to; that their feelings were already enlisted in
the cause; that they had already given proofs of earnest resolution to
support it, and of a liberal and self-denying spirit.  While his
majesty had been getting himself "an army by commission of array, by
subscription of loyal plate, pawning of crown jewels, and the
like--London citizens had subscribed horses and plate, every kind of
plate, down to women's thimbles, to an unheard-of amount; and when it
came to actual enlisting, London enlisted four thousand in one day."
As might have been expected, therefore, the audience responded to Lord
Saye and Sele, and prepared themselves to obey the summons of their
leaders; so that a few days afterwards, on hearing that Prince Rupert
with his army had come to Brentford, and on finding that the roar of
his cannon had reached as far as the suburbs, the train bands, with
amazing expedition, assembled under Major-General Skippon, and
forthwith marched off to Turnham Green.  Besides enlistment of
apprentices and others, and contributions of all kinds for raising
parliament armies, measures were adopted for the permanent defence of
London.  The city walls were repaired and mounted with artillery; the
sheds and buildings which had clustered about the outside of the city
boundaries in time of peace were swept away.  All avenues, except five,
were shut up, and these were guarded with military works the most
approved.  The first entrance, near the windmill, Whitechapel-road, was
protected by a hornwork; two redoubts with four flanks were raised
beside the second entrance, at Shoreditch; a battery and breastwork
were placed at the third entrance, in St. John's street; a two-flanked
redoubt and a small fort stood by the fourth entrance, at the end of
Tyburn, St. Giles's Fields; and a large fort with bulwarks overlooked
the fifth entrance, at Hyde Park Corner.  Other fortifications were
situated here and there by the walls, so as to fit the city to stand a
long siege.  A deep enthusiasm moved at least a considerable party in
the performance of these works.  They were not left to engineers or
artillerymen and the paid artificers, who in ordinary times raise
bastions and the like.  "The example of gentlemen of the best quality,"
says May, "knights and ladies going out with drums beating, and spades
and mattocks in their hands, to assist in the work, put life into the
drooping people."  While warlike harangues, enlistments, contributions,
and the building of fortifications, were going on, and the bustle and
music of military marches were heard in the street, while the walls and
gates bristled with cannons and soldiery, there were those within that
war-girdled city who sympathized indeed in the popular cause, but who
were far differently employed in its defence and promotion.

There was at this time residing in London one

  "Whose soul was like a star, and dwelt apart;
  Who had a voice whose sound was like the sea."

His place of abode was in Aldersgate-street, in an humble house, with a
small garden--"the muses' bower," as he called it; and there his
marvelous mind was searching out the foundations of laws and
governments, breathing after liberty, civil and religious, and
picturing an ideal commonwealth of justice, order, truth, purity, and
love, which he longed and hoped to see reduced to a reality in his own
native land; he was preparing, also, for some high work, which should
be "of power to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of
public virtue and public civility, to allay the perturbation of the
mind, and set the affections in right tune--a work not to be raised
from the heat of youth, or the vapors of wine, nor to be obtained by
the invocation of dame Memory and her syren daughters, but by devout
prayer to that eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and
knowledge, and sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his
altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases."

John Milton, who thus describes his employment in grand and sonorous
English, such as he alone could write, was by birth a Londoner, having
first opened his eyes in one of the houses of old Bread-street, and
received the elements of his vast and varied learning at St. Paul's
School.  Antiquarian research has traced him through successive
residences in St. Bride's Churchyard, Aldersgate-street, Barbican,
Holborn, Petty France, Bartholomew-close, Jewin-street, Bunhill-fields,
to his last resting-place in the upper end of the chancel of St.
Giles's, Cripplegate.  (Knight's London, vol. ii, p. 97.)  In youth he
had pursued his studies in his native city, after his removal from
Cambridge,

  "I, well content, where Thames with refluent tide
  My native city laves, meantime reside,
  Nor zeal, nor duty, now my steps impel
  To reedy Cam, and my forbidden cell.
  If peaceful days in lettered leisure spent
  Beneath my father's roof be banishment,
  Then call me banished: I will ne'er refuse
  A name expressive of the lot I choose;
  For here I woo the muse, with no control;
  For here my books, my life, absorb me whole."


In the maturity of his manhood, at the outbreak of the civil war,
Milton was pursuing his favorite studies at his house in
Aldersgate-street, combining with his literary researches and sublime
poetic flights, deep theological inquiries and lofty political
speculations.  At a time when the rumors of invasion were afloat, and
the inroads of an incensed enemy expected, he appealed to the
chivalrous cavalier in his own classic style:--

  "Lift not thy spear against the muse's bower.
  The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
  The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
  Went to the ground; and the repeated air
  Of sad Elecha's poet had the power
  To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare."

Relieved from the fears of invasion, he continued to occupy his pen in
the production of those wonderful prose works, which, scarcely less
than his poetry, are monuments of his enduring fame.  Probably it was
in his house in Barbican--the queer old barbican of that day, with a
portion of the Barbican, or tower, still standing, and picturesquely
gabled and carved dwellings crowded close against it--that Milton,
musing on his native city, wrote some of his most stirring political
tracts.  He was the representative of a large class of London citizens,
who, without taking up arms on either side, earnestly entered into the
great struggle, and thought and talked, and worked and wrote, as men
agitated and in travail for the restoration and welfare of their
distracted and bleeding country.

It is interesting, in connection with this illustrious man, to notice
one of his London contemporaries, also distinguished in English
literature, but in another way, presenting an opposite character, and
the type of a different class.  While Milton was exercising his lofty
intellect and plying his mighty pen on divinity and politics, Isaac
Walton, so well known as the author of the Complete Angler, and the
lives of Dr. Donne and others, was, besides pursuing his occupation as
a Hamburgh merchant, busily amusing himself with his favorite sport,
and preparing materials for his celebrated work, (which was published
in 1653,) as well as writing two of his lives, that of Donne and
Wotton, which appeared in 1640 and 1651.  When London was moved from
one end to the other by storms of political excitement, Walton,
undisturbed by the commotion in public affairs, quietly sought
enjoyment on the banks of the Thames with his rod and line, below
London Bridge, where he tells us "there were the largest and fattest
roach in the nation;" or, taking a longer excursion, rambled by the Lea
side, or went down as far as Windsor and Henley.  It is certainly
(whatever opinion we may form of the pursuits which engrossed so large
a portion of Walton's time) a relief, amidst scenes of strife, to catch
a view of little corners in English society, which seem to have been
sheltered from the sweeping tempest.  Curious it is also to observe how
little some men are affected by the great changes witnessed in their
country.  Moderation is frequently, however, nearly allied to
selfishness, and Walton apparently belonged to a class of individuals,
from whom society may in vain look for any improvements which involve
the sacrifice of personal ease or comfort.  He could, to use the
language of Dr. Arnold, "enjoy his angling undisturbed, in spite of
Star Chamber, ship-money, High Commission Court, or popish ceremonies;
what was the sacrifice to him of letting the public grievances take
their own way, and enjoying the freshness of a May morning in the
meadows on the banks of the Lea?"

However the great conflict might be regarded or forgotten, it waxed
hotter every day, and London became increasingly involved in the
strife.  For a while the parliament and the army were united in their
efforts against the king, and the city of London continued to lend them
efficient aid.  But at length disagreements arose between the
legislative and military powers, the former being in the main composed
of Presbyterians, while the latter were strongly leavened by the
Independents.  The rent became worse as time rolled on, till these two
religious parties, diverging in different directions, tore the
commonwealth asunder, and from having been allies became decided
antagonists.

The Presbyterians were strong in London; Presbyterians occupied the
city pulpits--Presbyterians ruled in the corporation.  The Westminster
Assembly, which began to sit in 1642, and continued their sessions
through a period of six years, numbered a large majority of that
denomination, and in the measures for the establishment of their own
views of religion throughout the country, met with the sympathy and
encouragement of a considerable portion of London citizens.  In the
church of St. Margaret's, Westminster, under the shadow of the
venerable abbey, the members of this assembly, with the Scots'
commissioners, and representatives from both houses of parliament, met
on the 25th of September, 1643, to take the Solemn League and Covenant,
the chosen symbol and standard of the Presbyterian party.  It was
certainly one of the most remarkable scenes in the ecclesiastical
history of our country; and whatever opinion may be formed of the
ecclesiastical principles which moved that memorable convocation, no
person of unprejudiced mind can fail to admire the piety, the
earnestness, zeal, and courage, which many of them evinced in the
performance of their task.  Solemn prayers were offered, addresses were
delivered in justification of the step they were taking, and then, as
the articles of the Covenant were read out from the pulpit, distinctly
one by one, each person standing uncovered, with his hand lifted bare
to heaven, swore to maintain them.  On the Lord's-day following, the
Covenant was tendered to all persons within the bills of mortality of
the city of London, and was welcomed by a number of ministers and a
great multitude of people.  Of the excitement which prevailed, some
idea may be gathered from the narrative of a royalist historian.  We
are informed by Clarendon, that the church of St. Antony, in Size-lane,
Watling-street, being in the neighborhood of the residence of the
Scotch commissioners, was appropriated to their use during their stay,
and that Alexander Henderson, a celebrated preacher, and one of their
chaplains, was accustomed to conduct service there.  "To hear these
sermons," he says, "there was so great a conflux and resort by the
citizens out of humor and faction, by others of all qualities out of
curiosity, by some that they might the better justify the contempt they
had of them, that from the first appearance of day in the morning of
every Sunday to the shutting in of the light the church was never
empty; they, especially the women, who had the happiness to get into
the church in the morning, (those who could not hang upon or about the
windows without, to be auditors or spectators,) keeping the places till
the afternoon exercises were finished."

As discussions arose between the parliament and the Presbyterians on
the one side, and the army and Independents on the other, the city of
London showed unequivocally its attachment to the former.  In addition
to difficulties arising from an embargo laid by the king on the coal
trade between Newcastle and London, difficulties met by parliamentary
orders for supplying fuel in the shape of turf or peat out of commons
and waste grounds, and also out of royal demesnes and bishops' lands;
in addition to other difficulties, commercial, municipal, and social,
springing from the disjointed state of public affairs--the Londoners
were plunged into new difficulties, ecclesiastical and political, by an
important step which they conceived it their duty to take.  The
Presbyterian ministers of London, upheld by their flocks, were zealous
for the full and unrestricted establishment of their own scheme of
discipline through the length and breadth of the city.  In June, 1646,
the ministers met at Zion College, contending for the Divine right of
their form of government, and maintaining that the civil magistrate had
no right to intermeddle with the censures of the Church.  The lord
mayor and common council joined them in a petition to the parliament to
that effect; but the political powers would not allow them that
uncontrolled and supreme ecclesiastical constitution which they craved.
However, they were authorized to carry out their Church polity
according to the law enacted for the whole kingdom, and to have
presbyteries in every parish, which parochial bodies should be
represented in a higher assembly called the classes, the classes again
in the provincial synod, and the synod in the general assembly.  London
formed a province with twelve classes, each containing from eight to
fifteen parishes.  Nowhere else but in London and in the county of
Lancashire did the Presbyterian establishment come into full operation,
and even in the metropolitan city, with all the zeal of the ministers
to support it, and with the majority of the people which they could
command, the success of the plan was very limited.  On the 19th of
December, 1646, the lord mayor and his brethren went up to Westminster
with a representation of grievances, including first the contempt that
began to be put upon the Covenant; and secondly, the growth of heresy
and schism, the pulpits being often usurped by preaching soldiers, who
infected all places where they came with dangerous errors.  Of these
grievances they desired redress.  In the next year, 1647, the synod at
Zion College published their testimony to the truth, as it was termed,
in which a passage occurs curiously illustrative of the opinions on the
subject of toleration that were then prevalent.  The last error they
witness against is called, they say, "the error of toleration,
patronizing and promoting all other errors, heresies, and blasphemies,
whatsoever, under the grossly-abused notion of liberty of conscience."
The Independents, who, though a minority, were a considerable body in
the city of London, being advocates for an extended toleration, as well
as for the enjoyment of liberty themselves, greatly displeased the
Presbyterian brethren, and materially thwarted the success of their
plans.  On both sides, no doubt, there were sincere, earnest, and holy
men, nor did they disagree as to the essential truths of our blessed
religion.  They were worshipers of the same everlasting Father, through
the same Divine Mediator, and trusted to the aid of the same gracious
Spirit.  They looked not to any morality of their own, as the ground of
their acceptance with their Creator, but, conscious of manifold sins,
rested on the sacrifice of "the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin
of the world."  Yet it is grievous to think, that in some instances a
difference, which extended no further than to the outward polity of the
Church, could dissever and almost alienate those whom grace had made
one.  And yet more grievous is it that good men who had only just
escaped from persecution themselves, should have been ready to fasten
the yoke upon brethren who could not see as they did.  However, in this
imperfect state of existence, such things have been and still are; but
it is consoling to remember, that a state of being shall one day exist,
when these sad anomalies will prevail no more.  Freed from prejudice,
passion, and infirmity, souls united by the tie of a common faith in
the essentials of the gospel, shall then rejoice in a perfect and
unbroken unity.

While the earlier stages of the struggle to which we have referred were
going on, some distinguished men in London, on both sides, were removed
from the scene of strife into the peaceful mansions of their Father's
house.  Two in particular are worthy of mention here as of the gentler
cast, who, though they differed, felt that charity had bonds to bind
the souls of godly men together, stronger than any difference of
ecclesiastical opinion could break.  Dr. Twiss, an eminent and learned
Presbyterian clergyman, the prolocutor of the assembly of divines, died
in London in 1646.  He had refused high preferment and flattering
invitations to a foreign university.  Forced from his living at Newbury
by the royalist party, and detained in London by his duties in the
assembly, for which he received but a very small allowance, he had to
struggle with poverty.  Indeed, he was so reduced, that when some of
the assembly were deputed to visit him, they reported that he was very
sick and in great straits.  He was buried in the Abbey, "near the upper
end of the poor folk's table, next the vestry, July 24th; thence, after
the Restoration, he was dug up and thrown into a hole in the churchyard
of St. Margaret's, near the back door of one of the prebendaries'
houses."  In the same year died Jeremiah Burroughs, of the Independent
school, and preacher to two of the largest congregations about London,
Stepney, and Cripplegate.  "He never gathered a separate congregation,
nor accepted of a parochial living, but wore out his strength in
continual preaching, and other services of the Church.  It was said the
divisions of the time broke his heart.  One of the last subjects he
preached upon and printed was his Irenicum, or attempt to heal
divisions among Christians."  Under the ascendency of the Presbyterians
in London, the old church ceremonies of course were abandoned--churches
were accommodated to the simplicity of worship preferred by the party
in power.  Superstitious monuments, images, and paintings, were
removed; the crosses in Cheapside and Charing Cross pulled down.  Even
St. Paul's Cross, because of its form and name, was not spared, though
hallowed by the remembrance of the great Reformers, who had there so
effectively preached.  Religious festivals were abolished, not
excepting Christmas--a measure to which the citizens did not quietly
submit, old habits and predilections being too strong to be overcome by
law.  In 1647, on that day most people kept their shops shut, and many
Presbyterian ministers occupied their pulpits.  Time, however, was
allotted for recreation; and it was arranged "that all scholars,
apprentices, and other servants should, with the leave of their
masters, have such convenient reasonable relaxation every second
Tuesday in the month, throughout the year, as formerly they used to
have upon the festivals."  It may be added, that stage plays were
forbidden, and the theatres in London closed; galleries, seats, and
boxes, were removed by warrant from justices of the peace, and all
actors convicted of offending against this law were sentenced to be
publicly whipped.

In consequence of the excitement of the times, the parliament issued an
order forbidding persons to appear in the streets of London armed, or
to come out of doors after nine o'clock at night.  It was further
enjoined, that all persons coming into the city should present
themselves at Guildhall and produce their passes, and also enter into
an engagement not to bear arms against the parliament.  The
misunderstanding between the legislature and the army becoming more
grave and ominous than ever, the city corporation besought the former
to disband the latter--a thing more easily proposed than accomplished.
The citizens desired to have a militia for their own defence, under
officers to be nominated by the common council; and were likewise
anxious that the king, now in the hands of the army, should be brought
to London, and a personal treaty entered into with him.  Tumultuous
assemblages, gathered from London, took place round the doors of the
House of Commons, some of the mob thrusting in their heads, with their
hats on, and shouting out, "Vote, vote;" and even forcing the speaker,
when he was about to leave the chair, to remain at his post, violently
demanding that their petition should be granted.  The army at the time
lay coiled up near London with most threatening aspect, and to add to
the terror of the city, the speaker of the Commons and a hundred
members withdrew from the metropolis, and repaired to the camp.  Orders
were now given by the common council to the train bands to repair the
fortifications, and for all persons capable of bearing arms to appear
at the appointed places of rendezvous.  Fairfax and Cromwell, the
commanders of the army, wrote an expostulatory letter to the city,
stating their grievances, and disavowing all desire to injure the
place.  An answer was sent, very unsatisfactory to the parties
addressed, and things wore an increasingly alarming appearance.  Still
the citizens seemed determined to oppose the army, and entered into an
engagement to promote the return of the king to London.  Shops were
shut up, a stop was put to business, horses were forbidden to be sent
beyond the walls, and whole nights were spent in anxious deliberation.
The army, however, was pressing towards the gates on the Southwark
side, and while the citizens were debating and planning, showed in an
unmistakable manner that it at least was in action.  The peril being
imminent, on the 4th of August the common council and committee
assembled in Guildhall, vast multitudes of the people repairing thither
to learn the result of the deliberations.  An express arrived, stating
that Fairfax with the army had halted on their march.  "Let us go out
and destroy them," cried a stentorian voice; but a second express, on
the heels of the first, ran in to correct the mistake of his
predecessor, and to assure them that Fairfax and his men were no
halters, but were marching on with great energy.  This changed the tone
of the assembly, and all exclaimed, "Treat! treat!"  The committee
spent most of the night in consultation, and the next morning
despatched a submissive letter to the general.  The inhabitants of
Southwark not having sympathized with their brethren on the other side
of the water in their opposition to the army, privately intimated to
the general their willingness to admit him, and, accordingly, a brigade
took possession of the borough about two o'clock in the morning, and
thereby became masters of London Bridge.  Another letter was despatched
from the city authorities, more submissive than the first, and
commissioners were speedily despatched to Hammersmith to wait upon
Fairfax, who had there taken up his quarters, and formally yield to him
all the forts on the west side of the metropolis.  On the 6th of
August, 1647, the general was received in state by the corporation at
Hyde Park, and escorted in procession to the city, being the same day
constituted constable of the Tower by the ordinance of parliament.
Three days afterwards, he took possession of that old fortress, being
attended by a deputation from the common council, who complimented him
in the highest terms, and invited him and his principal officers to
dinner.  After an interval of another three days, the city voted
£1,200, to be spent on a gold basin and ewer, as a present to this
distinguished officer.  The fortifications were dismantled, ports and
chains taken away, and the army quartered in and about the city: many,
we are told, in great houses, though the season was rigorous, were
obliged to lie on the bare floor, with little or no firing.  Orders
were issued to provide bedding for the cold and weary soldiers; and
when the city failed to fulfil its promise to pay money to the army,
troops were dispatched to Weavers', Haberdashers', and Goldsmiths'
Halls, the first of which they lightened of its treasure to the amount
of £20,000.  Strict injunctions, however, were given for the orderly
and peaceable conduct of the military, on pain of death.  London was
now reduced to dumb quietude, save that murmurings were heard from the
Presbyterians, who still insisted upon making terms with the king; but
it was all in vain.  The torrent rolled on, and swept away monarch and
throne; of its devastations there are awful recollections associated
with Charing Cross and Whitehall.

The latter was made the prison-house of the monarch during his trial.
Hence he passed to the old orchard stair, to take boat for Westminster
Hall.  A servant, whom he particularly noticed on these occasions, has
become an object of interest to the religious portion of the English
public, from his having been the father of the eminently holy Philip
Henry, and the grandfather of Matthew Henry, the commentator.  When
Charles returned to the palace after the absence of a few years, which,
because of the sorrows that darkened them, seemed an age, he accosted
his old attendant with the inquiry, "Art thou yet alive?"  "He
continued," says Philip Henry, speaking of his father, "during all the
war time in his house at Whitehall, though the profits of his place
ceased.  The king passing by his door under a guard to take water, when
he was going to Westminster to that which they called his trial,
inquired for his old servant, Mr. John Henry, who was ready to pay his
due respects to him, and prayed God to bless his majesty, and to
deliver him out of the hands of his enemies, for which the guard had
like to have been rough upon him."  The king was condemned by the court
of justice instituted for the occasion, and on the 30th of January,
1649, was publicly beheaded.  The place which had been the scene of
many of his youthful revels with the Duke of Buckingham, and which had
witnessed the early pomp and pageants of his reign, having been
converted into his prison, now became the spot where his blood was to
be spilt.  He had been removed to St. James's Palace, after his
sentence, and there spent Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.  At ten o'clock
on Tuesday, he crossed the park to Whitehall, under military guard,
Juxon, bishop of London, walking on the right, and Colonel Tomlinson,
who was his jailer, on the left.  Reaching the palace, he went up the
stairs leading to the long gallery into his chamber, where he remained
in prayer for an hour, and received the sacrament.  Two or three dishes
of refreshments had been prepared, which he declined, and could only be
prevailed on to take a piece of bread and a glass of claret.  All
things being prepared, and the hour of one arrived, he passed into the
Banqueting House, and thence proceeded, by a passage broken through the
wall, to the scaffold.  It was covered with black, and exhibited the
frightful apparatus of death.  There stood the block, and by it two
executioners in sailor's clothes, with vizards and perukes.  Regiments
of horse and foot were stationed round the spot, while a dense
multitude crowded the neighboring avenues, and many a serious
countenance looked down from the windows and the roofs of houses.  No
shouts of insult met the unhappy prince as he stepped on the stage of
death, but perfect and solemn silence pervaded the closely-pressed
throng, as well as the soldiers on duty.  Pity for the fallen monarch
in his misfortunes, prevailed even with some who had condemned his
unconstitutional and arbitrary course; so completely do the gentler
feelings of our nature at such times master the conclusions at which
the judgment has before arrived.  Nor should it be forgotten, that very
many there, who had regarded with alarm and indignation not a few of
the acts which Charles had performed, shrank from the thought of the
penalty to which he was doomed, as too severe, or decidedly impolitic.
Others, also, were present, royalists in heart, whatever might be their
caution at such a time in avowing their principles.  It was the king's
wish to address the multitude; but not being able to make himself heard
so far, he delivered a speech to those who were near him, in which he
expressed his forgiveness of his enemies, and then proceeded to
maintain those high notions of kingly power which had proved his ruin.
At the suggestion of the bishop, he closed by declaring, "I die a
Christian, according to the profession of the Church of England, as I
found it left me by my father.  I have on my side a good cause and a
gracious God."  "There is but one stage more," said Juxon: "it is
turbulent and troublesome, but a short one.  It will carry you from
earth to heaven, and there you will find joy and comfort."  "I go," he
said, "from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown."  "You exchange,"
rejoined the bishop, "an earthly for an eternal crown--a good
exchange."  Taking off his cloak, he gave the insignia of the order of
the garter to the prelate, adding significantly, "Remember!" then
kneeling down by the block, his head was severed from his body at a
blow.  Philip Henry, son of the old Whitehall servant, witnessed that
mournful tragedy.  "There he was," says his son Matthew, "when the king
was beheaded, and with a very heavy heart saw that tragical blow given.
Two things he used to relate, that he took notice of himself that day,
which I know not if any historians mention.  One was, that at the
instant the blow was given, there was such a dismal universal groan
among the thousands of people that were within sight of it, as it were
with one consent, such as he had never heard before, and desired that
he might never hear the like again, nor see such cause for it.  The
other was, that immediately after the stroke was struck, there was,
according to order, one troop marching from Charing Cross towards
King-street, and another from King-street towards Charing Cross,
purposely to disperse and scatter the people, and to divert the dismal
thoughts with which they could not but be filled, by driving them to
shift every one for his own safety."

A commonwealth was established, and London submitted in form, if not in
heart, to the victorious Cromwell.  Returning from Worcester, where he
fought his last great battle, he entered the city in triumph; speaker
and parliament, lord president and council of state, mayor, sheriff,
and corporation, with an innumerable multitude, rending the air with
their shouts, accompanied by cannon salutes; in the midst of which,
says Whitelock, "he carried himself with much affability, and now and
afterwards, in all his discourses about Worcester, would seldom mention
anything of himself, mentioned others only, and gave, as was due, the
glory of the action to God."

When the commonwealth had lasted four years, the government was changed
into the form of a protectorate, and Cromwell was installed lord
protector.  Of all the grand ceremonials that have taken place in
London or Westminster, this was among the most remarkable, and
certainly quite unique.  The coronation of princes within the walls of
St. Peter's Abbey has been of frequent occurrence; but the installation
of the chief of the English republic was without precedent, and without
imitation.  On the 16th of December, 1653, soon after noon, Cromwell
proceeded in his carriage to Westminster Hall, through lines of
military, both horse and foot.  The aldermen of London, the judges, two
commissioners of the great seal, and the lord mayor, went before, and
the two councils of state, with the army, followed.  Entering the Court
of Chancery, Cromwell, attired in a suit and cloak of black velvet,
with long boots and a gold-banded hat, was conducted to a chair of
state, placed on a rich carpet.  He took his place before the chair,
between the commissioners; the judges formed a circle behind, the
civilians standing on the right, the military on the left.  The clerk
of the council read the instrument of government, consisting of
forty-two articles, which the lord protector, raising his right hand to
heaven, solemnly swore to maintain and observe.  General Lamberth,
falling on his knees, offered him a civic sword in a scabbard, which he
received, putting aside his military weapon, to indicate that he
intended to govern by law and not by force.  Seating himself in the
chair, he put on his hat, the rest remaining uncovered; then, receiving
the seal from the commissioners, and the sword from the lord mayor of
London, he immediately returned them to the same officers, and at the
close of this ceremony proceeded again to the palace at Whitehall.  He
was soon afterwards invited by the city to dine at Guildhall, where he
was received with as much honor as had been formerly paid to
sovereigns, the companies in their stands lining the streets through
which he passed, attended by the lord mayor and aldermen on horseback.
After the protector had been sumptuously entertained, he conferred the
honor of knighthood on the chief magistrate of the city.  Standing in
the Painted Chamber at Westminster, with his first parliament before
him, he alludes with special satisfaction to this city visit.  "I would
not forget," he says, "the honorable and civil entertainment I found in
the great city of London.  Truly I do not think it folly to remember
this; for it was very great and high, and very public, and included as
numerous a body of those that are known by names and titles, the
several corporations and societies of citizens in this city, as hath at
any time been seen in England,--and not without some appearance of
satisfaction also."  Cromwell returned the compliment paid him by the
city, and invited the mayor and court of aldermen to dine with him.  A
good understanding seems to have been maintained between the lord
protector and the metropolitan authorities.  When plots were formed to
take away his life, he called the corporation together, and gave them
an extraordinary commission to preserve the peace, and invested them
with the entire direction of the municipal militia.  He also relieved
the citizens from some of their taxes, revived the artillery company,
and granted a license for the free importation of four thousand
chaldrons of coals from Newcastle for the use of the poor--measures
which made his highness popular in London.

"Subsequently to the annihilation of the royal authority, or between
that and the protectorate, the city became the grand focus of the
parliamentary government, as is abundantly testified by the numerous
tracts and other records of the period.  Guildhall was a second House
of Commons, an auxiliary senate, and the companies' halls the
meeting-places of those branches of it denominated committees.  All the
newspapers of the day abound with notices of the occupation of the
companies' premises by their committees.  Goldsmiths' Hall was their
bank, Haberdashers' Hall their court for adjustment of claims,
Clothworkers' Hall for sequestration, and all the other halls of the
great companies were offices for the transaction of other government
business.  Weavers' Hall might properly be denominated the exchequer.
From this place parliament was accustomed to issue bills, about and
before 1652, in the nature of exchequer bills, and which were commonly
known under the name of Weaver-Hall bills."--_Herbert's Hist. of Livery
Companies_, vol. i.  During the melancholy time that the civil war
raged in England, the London companies were much oppressed, and spoiled
of their resources by the arbitrary exactions made by those in power;
but they seem to have enjoyed a better condition under the
protectorate, when a season of comparative rest and quietude returned.

Cromwell's state residence in London was Whitehall.  With much less of
splendor and show than had been exhibited by the former occupants of
that palace, the protector maintained a degree of magnificence and
dignity befitting the chief ruler of a great country.[1]  He had around
him his court--composed of his family, some leading officers of the
army, and a slight sprinkling of the nobility; but what interests
posterity the most, it included Milton, Marvell, Waller, and Dryden.
Foreign ambassadors and other distinguished personages were entertained
at his table in sober state, the dinner being brought in by the
gentlemen of his guard, clothed in gray coats, with black velvet
collars and silver lace trimmings.  "His own diet was spare and not
curious, except in public treatments, which were constantly given the
Monday in every week to all the officers in the army not below a
captain, when he used to dine with them.  A table was likewise spread
every day of the week for such officers as should casually come to
court.  Sometimes he would, for a frolic, before he had half dined,
give order for the drum to beat, and call in his foot-guards, who were
permitted to make booty of all they found on the table.  Sometimes he
would be jocund with some of the nobility, and would tell them what
company they had kept, when and where they had drunk the king's health
and the royal family's, bidding them when they did it again to do it
more privately; and this without any passion, and as festivous, droll
discourse."[2]  In the neighboring parks, the protector was often seen
taking the air in his sedan, on horseback, and in his coach.  On one
occasion he turned coachman, with a rather disastrous result, which is
amusingly told by Ludlow, whose genuine republicanism prejudiced him
against Cromwell after he had assumed the supreme power.  "The duke of
Holstein made Cromwell a present of a set of gray Friesland
coach-horses, with which taking the air in the park, attended only by
his secretary Thurloe and a guard of janizaries, he would needs take
the place of the coachman, not doubting but the three pair of horses he
was about to drive would prove as tame as the three nations which were
ridden by him, and, therefore, not content with their ordinary pace, he
lashed them very furiously; but they, unaccustomed to such a rough
driver, ran away in a rage, and stopped not till they had thrown him
out of the box, with which fall his pistol fired in his pocket, though
without any hurt to himself: by which he might have been instructed how
dangerous it was to meddle with those things wherein he had no
experience."  In connection with these anecdotes of Cromwell may be
introduced an extract from the Moderate Intelligencer, illustrative of
the public amusements in London at that time:--

"Hyde Park, May 1, 1654.--This day there was a hurling of a great ball
by fifty Cornish gentlemen of the one side, and fifty on the other; one
party played in red caps and the other in white.  There was present,
his highness the lord protector, many of his privy council, and divers
eminent gentlemen, to whose view was presented great agility of body,
and most neat and exquisite wrestling, at every meeting of one with
another, which was ordered with such dexterity, that it was to show
more the strength, vigor, and nimbleness of their bodies, than to
endanger their persons.  The ball they played withal was silver, and
was designed for that party which did win the goal."  Coach-racing was
another amusement of the period, perhaps something of an imitation of
the old chariot races; races on foot were also run.

The author of a book entitled, "A Character of England, as it was
lately presented to a Nobleman of France," published in 1659, further
describes Hyde Park in the manner following: "I did frequently in the
spring accompany my lord N---- into a field near the town, which they
call Hide Park; the place not unpleasant, and which they use as our
course, but with nothing of that order, equipage, and splendor, being
such an assembly of wretched jades and hackney coaches, as, next a
regiment of carmen, there is nothing approaches the resemblance.  The
park was, it seems, used by the late king and nobility for the
freshness of the air and the goodly prospect; but it is that which now
(besides all other exercises) they pay for here, in England, though it
be free in all the world besides, every coach and horse which enters
buying his mouthful, and permission of the publican who has purchased
it, for which the entrance is guarded with porters and long staves."

During the commonwealth, what may be called a drab-colored tint
pervaded London life, absorbing the rich many-colored hues which
sparkle in the early picturesque history of the old metropolis.  The
pageantries of the Tudors and Stuarts were at an end; civic processions
lost much of their glory; maskings and mummings were expelled from the
inns of court; May-day became as prosaic as other days; Christmas was
stripped of its holly decorations, and shorn from its holiday revels.
The companies' halls were divested of royal arms, and the churches
purified from images and popish adornments.  But the preceding
particulars show that the tinge of the times was not quite so drab as
it seems on the pages of some partial and prejudiced writers.  London
had not the sepulchral look, and commonwealthmen had not the
funeral-like aspect commonly attributed to them.  They had, as we have
seen, their cheerfulness and festivity, their banquets, recreations,
and amusements; and, no doubt, in the mansions and houses of the city
folk, both Presbyterian and Independent, there was comfort and taste,
and pleasure, far different from what would be inferred from the
accounts of them given by some, as if they were all starched
precisians, a formal and woe-begone race.  There was a dash of humor in
Cromwell, to many about him quite inconsistent with that lugubriousness
so often described as the characteristic of the times.  With the
suppression of the rude, boisterous, profligate, and vicious amusements
of earlier times, there was certainly an improvement of the morals of
the people.  London was purified from a good deal of pollution by the
change.  The order, sobriety, and good behavior of the London citizens,
during the period that regular government existed under Cromwell,
appear in pleasing contrast to the confusion and riots of earlier
times.  There was a general diffusion of religious instruction, an
earnestness in preaching, and an example of reverence for religion,
exhibited by those in authority, which could not but operate
beneficially.  No doubt in London, as elsewhere, there were formalism
and hypocrisy; the length of religious services had sometimes an
unfavorable influence upon the young; severity and force, too, were
unjustifiably employed in controlling public manners; but when all
these drawbacks are made, and every other which historical impartiality
may demand, there remains in the condition of London in those times, a
large amount of genuine virtue and religion.

The night of the 2d of September, 1658, was one of the stormiest ever
known.  The wind blew a hurricane, and swept with resistless violence
over city and country; many a house that night was damaged, chimneys
being thrown down, tiles torn off, and even roofs carried away.  Old
trees in Hyde Park and elsewhere were wrenched from the soil.  Cromwell
was lying that night on his death-bed, and the Londoners' attention was
divided between the phenomena of the weather, and the great event
impending in the history of the commonwealth.  The royalists said that
evil angels were gathering in the storm round Whitehall, to seize on
the departing spirit of the usurper; his friends interpreted it as a
warning in providence of the loss the country was about to sustain.
Amidst the storm and the two interpretations of it, both equally
presumptuous, Cromwell lay in the arms of death, breathing out a
prayer, which, whatever men may think of the character of him who
uttered it, will be read with deep interest by all: "Lord, though a
miserable and wretched creature, I am in covenant with thee, through
thy grace, and may and will come to thee for thy people.  Thou hast
made me a mean instrument to do them some good and thee service.  Many
of them set too high a value upon me, though others would be glad of my
death.  Lord, however thou disposest of me, continue and go on to do
good for them.  Teach those who look too much upon thy instruments to
depend more upon thyself, and pardon such as desire to trample upon the
dust of a poor worm, for they are thy people too."

Cromwell was not by any means given to excessive state and ceremony,
but after his death his friends evinced their fondness for it by the
singularly pompous funeral which they appointed for him.  Somerset
House was selected as the scene of the lying in state, and thither the
whole city flocked to witness the spectacle of gorgeous gloom.  They
passed through three ante-chambers, hung with mourning, to the funeral
apartment.  A bed of state covered the coffin, upon which, surrounded
by wax lights, lay Cromwell's effigy, attired in royal robes.  Pieces
of his armor were arranged on each side, together with the symbols of
majesty, the globe and sceptre.  Behind the head an imperial crown was
exhibited on a chair of state.  Strikingly did the whole portray the
fleeting and evanescent character of earthly pomp and power.  It being
found necessary to inter the body before the conclusion of the public
funereal pageant, the effigy was removed to another room, and placed in
an erect instead of a recumbent position, with the emblems of kingship
in its hands, and the crown royal on its head.  This exhibition
continued for eight days, at the conclusion of which period there was a
solemn procession to Westminster Abbey.  The streets were lined with
military, and the principal functionaries of the city of London, the
officers of the army, the ministers of state, the foreign ambassadors,
and some members of Cromwell's family, composed the cortége, which
conducted the funeral car bearing the effigy to the place where the
body was interred.

The city of London acknowledged Richard Cromwell as lord high protector
on his father's death.  Probably an address of congratulation from the
metropolis on the event of his accession, was included among the
contents of the old trunks, filled with such documents, to which
Richard humorously referred when his short career of rulership reached
its close.  "Take particular care of these trunks," he said to his
servant, when giving some directions about them; "they contain no less
than the lives and fortunes of all the good people of England."  The
corporation of London having played a conspicuous part in all the
changes of those changeful times, was particularly consulted by the
parties who seized the reins of government when they had fallen from
the hands of Oliver, and could not be held by his incompetent son.  So
cordial seemed the understanding between the city magistrates and the
ruling authorities--consisting of the rump parliament, the council of
state, and the officers of the army--that an entertainment was given to
the latter at Grocers' Hall, on the 6th of October, 1659, by the lord
mayor and corporation, to celebrate Lambert's victory over Sir George
Booth, who had raised an insurrection in the west of England.  At these
festivities there was, on the part of the city, more of the semblance
than the reality of friendship; for in the disjointed state of public
affairs, and the manifest impotence of those who had undertaken to
rule, London shared the general sentiments of dissatisfaction and
alarm.  It was felt that the parliament was but a name, and the
re-establishment of a military despotism by the army was the object of
apprehension.  In the disagreement between parliament and army the city
wished to stand neutral, though the apprentices rose in riotous
opposition to the committee of safety, which was formed of republican
officers.  The feelings of this youthful part of the community were
sympathized in by many others, though they prudently desired to avoid
any infraction of the public peace.  A general wish pervaded the city
that a free parliament might be called; and when the rump parliament
required the collection of the taxes, the citizens refused the impost,
and objected to the power which had levied it.  General Monk was
ordered to march on the refractory citizens, which he did.  He
forthwith stationed guards at the gates of the city, and then broke
them down, destroying the portcullises and removing the posts and
chains.  While Monk was thus chastising the Londoners, he fell out with
the parliament, in whose service he professed to act, and at once
changing sides, sought the forgiveness of the city for his deeds of
violence, which, as he alleged, had been done, not from his own
inclination, but at the command of the parliament.  Mutual engagements
and promises were now exchanged between the general and the citizens.
Posts, gates, chains, portcullises, were replaced and repaired; and the
corporation being let into the secret of Monk's design to promote the
restoration of the monarchy, cordially acquiesced in the object.  When
messengers from Charles, who was at Breda, reached the city, they were
joyfully welcomed, and £10,000 was voted out of the civic coffers to
assist his majesty.  While preparations for the king's return were
proceeding prosperously, a solemn thanksgiving-day was held on the 10th
of May, 1660, on which occasion the lord mayor and aldermen and the
several companies assembled at St. Paul's Cathedral, when the good
Richard Baxter preached to them on "Right Rejoicing: or, The Nature and
Order of rational and warrantable Joy."  Feeling deeply as he did for
the political welfare of the city and the country, and deeming the
restoration of the monarch conducive to that end, yet the preacher,
filled as he was with love to souls and zeal for God, would not let the
occasion pass without wholly devoting it to the highest ends of the
Christian ministry.  It was his compassion, he says, to the frantic
merry world, and to the self-troubling melancholy Christian, and his
desire methodically to help them in their rejoicing, which formed his
exhortation, and prompted the selection of his subject.  No doubt men
of all kinds thronged old St. Paul's to hear the Puritan preach on the
king's return; and on reading over his wonderfully earnest and
conscience-searching sermon, one cannot help feeling how many there
must have been there to whom his warnings were as appropriate as they
still are to multitudes in our own day, perhaps even to some person now
perusing this sketch of the history of London.  "Were your joy," said
he, "but reasonable, I would not discourage it.  But a madman's
laughter is no very lovely spectacle to yourselves.  And I appeal to
all the reason in the world, whether it be reasonable for a man to live
in mirth that is yet unregenerate and under the curse and wrath of God,
and can never say, in the midst of his greatest pomp and pleasure, that
he is sure to be an hour out of hell, and may be sure he shall be there
forever, if he die before he have a new, a holy, and a heavenly nature,
though he should die with laughter in his face, or with a jest in his
mouth, or in the boldest presumption that he shall be saved; yet, as
sure as the word of God is true, he will find himself everlastingly
undone, as soon as ever his soul is departed from his body, and he sees
the things that he would not believe.  Sirs, is it rational to dance in
Satan's fetters, at the brink of hell, when so many hundred diseases
are all ready to mar the mirth, and snatch away the guilty soul, and
cast it into endless desperation?  I exceedingly pity the ungodly in
their unwarrantable melancholy griefs, and much more an ungodly man
that is bleeding under the wounds of conscience.  But a man that is
merry in the depth of misery is more to be pitied than he.  Methinks it
is one of the most painful sights in all the world, to see a man ruffle
it out in bravery, and spend his precious time in pleasure, and melt
into sensual and foolish mirth, that is a stranger to God, and within a
step of endless woe.  When I see their pomp, and feasting, and
attendance, and hear their laughter and insipid jests, and the fiddlers
at their doors or tables, and all things carried as if they made sure
of heaven, it saddeneth my heart to think, alas! how little do these
sinners know the state that they are in, the God that now beholdeth
them, the change that they are near.  How little do they think of the
flames that they are hastening to, and the outcries and lamentations
that will next ensue."  Baxter knew that he would have, in all
probability, many a light and careless mortal to hear him at St. Paul's
that day, whose every thought and feeling would be engrossed in the
anticipation of the gayeties that were about to return and supersede
the strictness of Puritan times; he anticipated the presence of men
who, like moths round a candle, were darting about in false security on
the borders of everlasting fire, and thus he sent the arrows of his
powerful eloquence direct at their consciences.  Imagination can
scarcely refrain from picturing some dissipated merry-maker arrested by
such appeals, trembling under such tremendous and startling truths,
quailing with terror, pale with anguish, melted into repentance,
fleeing to the Saviour for mercy, and going home to pour forth in
secret tears and prayers before God.

On the 26th of May, King Charles II. landed at Dover, and on the 29th
entered the metropolis.  He was met by the corporation in St. George's
fields, Southwark, where a grand tent had been fitted up for receiving
him.  A sumptuous collation was ready, and the lord mayor waited to
place in the hands of the monarch the city sword.  Arrived and welcomed
by his subjects, Charles conferred the honor of knighthood on the chief
magistrate, and then proceeded to London, amidst a display of rejoicing
such as brought back the remembrance of other days.  The streets were
lined with the companies and train bands; the houses were adorned with
tapestries and silks; windows, balconies, roofs, and scaffolds, were
crowded with spectators; and the conduits ran with delicious wines.
The procession was formed of a troop of gentlemen, arrayed in cloth of
silver; two hundred gentlemen in velvet coats, with footmen in purple
liveries; another troop in buff coats and green scarfs; two hundred in
blue and silver, with footmen in sea-green and silver; two hundred and
twenty, with thirty footmen in gray and silver, and four trumpeters;
one hundred and five, with six trumpets; seventy, with five trumpets;
two troops of three hundred, and one of one hundred, all mounted and
richly habited.  Then followed his majesty's arms, carried by two
trumpeters, together with the sheriff's men and six hundred members of
the companies on horseback, in black velvet coats and gold chains.
Kettle-drums and trumpets, twelve ministers at the head of the
life-guards, the city marshal, sheriffs, aldermen, all in rich
trappings, the lord mayor, and last of all, the king, riding between
the Dukes of York and Gloucester.  The rear of the procession was
composed of military.  An entertainment at Guildhall followed, on the
5th of July.  Nothing could exceed the rapture of the old royalist
party in London.  Cavaliers and their followers, restrained by the
regulations and example of the governing powers during the
commonwealth, and now freed from all restriction on their indulgence,
were loud and extravagant in their demonstrations of joy.  London was
transformed into a scene of carnival-like festivity.  There were
bonfires and the roasting of oxen, while the rumps of beef divided
among hungry citizens suggested many a joke on the rump parliament.
Revelry and intemperance were the order of the day.  The taverns rang
with the roundelay of the licentious and intemperate--"The king shall
enjoy his own again."  At night, the riotous amusement continued,
amidst illumination of the most brilliant kind which at that time could
be supplied.  The whole was a fitting prelude to the reign that
followed, and an affecting commentary on the moving exhortations of
Baxter, to which we have before referred.

A band of wild and crazy enthusiasts, denominated Fifth Monarchy men,
troubled the peace of the city in the beginning of the following year.
Led on by a fanatic named Venner, they insisted on the overthrow of
King Charles, and the establishment of the reign of King Jesus.  Though
only between sixty and seventy in number, they were so feebly opposed
by the authorities who had the safety of the city intrusted to them,
that they marched from street to street, bearing down their opponents,
and engaging in successful skirmishes, both with train-bands and
horse-guards.  For two days this handful of misguided men kept up their
insurrection, and at last intrenched themselves in an ale-house in
Cripplegate, where, after severe fighting, the remnant of them were
captured.  About twenty persons were killed on each side during the
whole fray, and eleven of the rebels were afterwards executed.  Soon
after this, on the 23d of April, the coronation took place, which
occasioned another gala day for the citizens, who now, in addition to
other demonstrations of joy, erected four triumphal arches--the first
in Leadenhall-street, representing his majesty's arrival; the second in
Cornhill, forming a naval representation; the third in Cheapside, in
honor of Concord; and the fourth in Fleet-street, symbolical of Plenty.

The old national amusements were revived in London on the restoration.
May-day and Christmas resumed their former appearance.  The May-pole in
the Strand was erected in 1661.  The theatres were re-opened, pouring
forth a flood of licentiousness.  The love of show and decoration was
cherished afresh.  Dresses and equipages shone in more than their
ancient splendor.  In 1661, it was thought necessary to repress the
gilding of coaches and chariots, because of the great waste and expense
of gold in their adorning.

London also witnessed other accompaniments of the restoration.  The
regicide trials took place soon after the king's return, and could not
fail deeply to interest, in one way or the other, the mass of the
citizens, many of them personally acquainted with the parties, and
perhaps abettors of the acts for which they were now arraigned.
Charing Cross was the scene of the execution of Harrison, Scrope,
Jones, Hugh Peters, and others.  The spirit in which they met their
deaths was very extraordinary.  "If I had ten thousand lives," said
Scrope, "I could freely and cheerfully lay them down all to witness in
this matter."  Jones, the night before he died, told a friend that he
had no other temptation but this, lest he should be too much
transported, and carried out to neglect and slight his life, so greatly
was he satisfied to die in that cause.  Peters, whom Burke styles "a
poor good man," said, as he was going to die, "What, flesh, art thou
unwilling to go to God through the fire and jaws of death?  This is a
good day; He is come that I have long looked for, and I shall be with
him in glory; and so he smiled when he went away."  Others were
executed at Tyburn; and there, too, the bodies of the protector Oliver
Cromwell, Treton, and Bradshaw, were ignominiously exposed on a gibbet,
having been dug out of their tombs in Westminster Abbey.



[1] He loved paintings and music, and encouraged proficients in elegant
art.  "I ventured," says Evelyn, in 1656, "to go to Whitehall, where of
many years I have not been, and found it very glorious and well
furnished."

[2] Perfect Politician, quoted in "London," vol. i, p. 360.




CHAPTER III.

THE PLAGUE YEAR IN LONDON.

Terrific pestilence had often visited London, and swept into the
eternal world multitudes of victims; but no calamity of this kind that
ever befel the inhabitants can be compared with the awful visitation of
the great plague year.  It broke out in Drury-lane, in the month of
December, 1664.  For some time it had been raging in Holland, and
apprehensions of its approach to the shores of England had for months
agitated the minds of the people.  Remarkable appearances in the
heavens were construed into Divine warnings of some impending
catastrophe; and the common belief in astrology led many, in the
excited state of feeling, to listen to the prognostications that issued
from the press, in almanacs and other publications of the day.  Defoe,
in his remarkable history of the plague, which, though in its form
fictitious, is doubtless in substance a credible narrative, describes a
man who, like Jonah, went through the streets, crying, "Yet forty days,
and London shall be destroyed."  Another ran about, having only some
slight clothing round his waist, exclaiming, with a voice and
countenance full of horror, "O, the great and dreadful God!"  Yet the
forebodings which were excited by reports from the continent, the
traditions of former visitations of pestilences, the actual breaking
out of the disease in a few instances, together with the superstitious
aggravations just noticed, only shadowed forth, in light pale hues, the
dark and intensely gloomy colors of the desolating providence which the
sovereign Ruler of all events brought over the city of London.
Head-ache, fever, a burning in the stomach, dimness of sight, and livid
spots on the chest, were symptoms of the fatal disorder.  These signs
became more numerous as the months of the year 1665 advanced; yet the
cases of plague were comparatively few till the month of June.  "June
the 7th," says an observant writer of that period in his diary, "the
hottest day that ever I felt in my life.  This day, much against my
will, I did see in Drury-lane two or three houses marked with a red
cross upon the doors, and 'Lord, have mercy upon us!' writ there, which
was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my
remembrance I ever saw."  Again, on the 17th of June: "It struck me
very deep this afternoon, going with a hackney coach down Holborn from
the lord treasurer's, the coachman I found to drive easily, and easily,
at last stood still, and came down hardly able to stand, and told me he
was suddenly struck very sick, and almost blind he could not see; so I
light, and went into another coach, with a sad heart for the poor man,
and myself also, lest he should have been struck with the plague."
This description of the first sight of the marked door, and the coach
going more and more easily till it stood still, with its plague-struck
driver, places the reader in the midst of the scene of disease and
sorrow, awakening sympathetic emotions with those sufferers in a now
distant age.

The alarm increased as the deaths multiplied, and people began to pack
up and leave London with all possible haste.  The court and the
nobility removed to a distance, and so also did vast numbers beside who
had the means of doing so, and were not confined by business; yet the
general terror was so great throughout the kingdom that friends were
sometimes far from being welcomed by those whom they visited.  "It is
scarcely possible," says Baxter, "for people who live in a time of
health and security to apprehend the dreadful nature of that
pestilence.  How fearful people were thirty or forty, if not a hundred
miles from London, of anything they brought from mercers' or drapers'
shops, or of goods that were brought to them, or of any persons who
came to their houses.  How they would shut their doors against their
friends; and if a man passed over the fields, how one would avoid
another, how every man was a terror to another.  O, how sinfully
unthankful are we for our quiet societies, habitations, and health!"
But the bulk of the people, of course, were compelled to remain in the
city, and, pent up in dirty, close, unventilated habitations, while the
weather was burning hot, were exposed to the unmitigated fury of the
contagion.  The weekly bills of mortality rose from hundreds to
thousands, till, in the month of September, the disease reached its
height, and no less than ten thousand souls were hurried into eternity.
The operations of business were of course checked, and in many cases
entirely suspended by the terrific progress of the calamity.  Several
shops were closed in every street; dwellings were often left empty, the
inmates having been smitten or driven away by the fatal scourge.  Some
of the public thoroughfares were nearly deserted.  The markets being
removed beyond the city walls, to prevent the people as much as
possible from coming together in masses; the erection of houses also
being unnecessary, and therefore discontinued for a while--carts and
wagons, laden with provision, or with building materials, no longer
frequented the highways, which, a few short months before, had been the
scene of busy activity.  Coaches were seldom seen, except when parties
were hurrying away from the city, or when some one, affected by the
disorder, was being conveyed home, with the curtains of the vehicle
closely drawn.  The grass growing in the streets, and the solemn
stillness which pervaded many parts of the great city, in contrast with
its previous state, are circumstances particularly mentioned in the
descriptions of London in the plague year, and they powerfully serve to
give the reader an affecting idea of the awful visitation.  Few
passengers appeared, and those few hurried on, in manifest fear of each
other, as if each was carrying to his neighbor the summons of death.[1]
The daughters of music were brought low; the din of business, and the
murmur of pleasant talk, and the London cries were silenced.  The
shrieks, however, of sufferers in agony, or of maniacs driven mad by
disease, broke on the awful quietude.  People might be heard crying out
of the windows for some to help them in their anguish--to assuage the
burning fever, or to carry their dead away.  Occasionally, some rushed
towards the Thames, with bitter cries, to seek relief from their
torments by suicide.  The Rev. Thomas Vincent, who was residing in
London at the time, describes some touching examples of sorrow, which
were only specimens of what prevailed to an indescribable extent.
"Amongst other sad spectacles," he says, "two, methought, were very
affecting; one of a woman coming alone, and weeping by the door where I
lived, (which was in the midst of the infection,) with _a little coffin
under her arm_, carrying it to the new churchyard.  I did judge that it
was the mother of the child, and that all the family besides were dead,
and that she was forced to coffin up and to bury with her own hands
this her last dead child!"  The second case to which this writer
alludes is even more terrible than that now given, but out of regard to
our readers' feelings we refrain from quoting it.  A passenger, the
same eye-witness adds, could hardly go out without meeting coffins; and
Defoe gives us a picture, as graphic as it is awful, of the mode of
sepulture adopted when the plague was at its height.  He informs us
that a great pit was dug in the churchyard of Aldgate parish, from
fifteen to sixteen feet broad, and twenty feet deep; at night, the
victims carried off in the day by death were brought in carts by
torchlight to this receptacle, the bellman accompanying them, and
calling on the inhabitants as they passed along to bring out their
dead.  Sixteen or seventeen bodies, naked, or wrapped in sheets or
rags, were thrown into one cart, and then huddled together into the
common grave.

The king of terrors sweeping into the eternal world so many thousands,
is a picture which must excite in the mind of the Christian solemn
emotions.  It is pleasing, however, to learn from Vincent how
tranquilly God's people departed in that season of Divine judgment.
"They died with such comfort as Christians do not ordinarily arrive
unto, except when they are called forth to suffer martyrdom for the
testimony of Jesus Christ.  Some who have been full of doubts, and
fears, and complaints, whilst they have lived and been well, have been
filled with assurance, and comfort, and praise, and joyful expectations
of glory, when they have been laid on their death-beds by this disease;
and not only more growing Christians, who have been more ripe for
glory, have had their comforts, but also some younger Christians, whose
acquaintance with the Lord hath been of no long standing."  There were
persons, however, who had lived through a course of profligacy, who, so
far from being led to repentance by the awful dispensation they
witnessed, only plunged into deeper excesses, driving away care by riot
and intemperance, or availing themselves of the confusion of the times
to commit robbery.  The immorality, daring presumption, and reckless
wickedness of a portion of the people during the London plague, as in
the plague at Florence in 1348, and the plague at Athens, described by
Thucydides, prove the depravity of the human heart, and the inefficacy
of afflictions or judgments, if unaccompanied by Divine grace, to melt
or change it.  We learn, however, that by the preaching of the gospel
some were graciously renewed and saved.  Baxter informs us, that
"abundance were converted from their carelessness, impenitency, and
youthful lusts and vanities, and religion took such a hold on many
hearts as could never afterwards be loosed."  The parish churches were
in several instances forsaken by their occupants, but many godly men
who had been ejected by the Uniformity Act, now came forward, with
their characteristic disinterestedness and zeal, to supply their
brethren's lack of service.  Vincent, already mentioned, with Clarkson,
Cradock, and Terry, distinguished themselves by holy efforts for the
conversion of sinners at that dreadful time.  A broad sheet exists in
the British Museum, containing "short instructions for the sick,
especially those who, by contagion, or otherwise, are deprived of the
presence of a faithful pastor, by Richard Baxter, written in the great
plague year, 1665."  Preaching was the principal method of doing good.
Large congregations assembled to hear the man of God faithfully
proclaim his message.  The imagination readily restores the timeworn
Gothic structure in the narrow street--the people coming along in
groups--the crowded church doors, and the broad aisles, as well as the
oaken pews and benches, filled with one dense mass--the anxious
countenances looking up at the pulpit--the divine, in his plain black
gown and cap--the reading of the Scriptures--the solemn prayer--the
sermon, quaint indeed, but full of point and earnestness, and
possessing that prime quality, adaptation--the thrilling appeals at the
close of each division of the discourse--the breathless silence, broken
now and then by half-suppressed sobs and lamentations--the hymn,
swelling in dirge-like notes--and the benediction, which each would
regard as possibly a dismissal to eternity; for who but must have felt
his exposure to the infection while sitting amidst that promiscuous
audience?  It is at times like these that the worth of the soul is
appreciated, and a saving interest in Christ perceived to be more
valuable than all the accumulated treasures of earth.  So far as their
health was concerned, the prudence of the people in congregating
together in such crowds, at such a season, has been often and fairly
questioned; yet who that looks at the imminent spiritual peril in which
multitudes were placed, but must commend the religious concern which
they manifested; and who that takes into account the peculiar
circumstances of the preachers, laboring without emolument at the
hazard of their lives, but must applaud their apostolic
zeal?--_Spiritual Heroes_, p. 289.

The plague reached its height in September--during one night of that
month ten thousand persons died.  After this the pestilence gradually
diminished, and by the end of the year it had ceased.  The visitation
has acquired additional interest for us of late from the occurrence of
cholera to an alarming extent.  The former, like the latter, was
increased by poverty and filth, and to a much greater degree; for,
badly as houses have been ventilated, of late, and defective as may be
our drainage, our fathers were incomparably worse off than we are in
these respects.  Houses were crowded together, and left in a state of
impurity which would shock the least delicate and refined of the
present day.  There were scarcely any under sewers.  Ditches were the
channels for carrying off refuse; and as supplements to these imperfect
methods of cleansing a great city, there were public dunghills.  The
effluvia from such sources was, indeed, humanly speaking, enough to
cause a pestilence, and at the time of the plague must have been
intolerable from the heat of the weather; while some means, also,
adopted by the authorities for stopping the ravages of mortality, only
promoted the evil--such as the shutting up of houses, and the kindling
fires in the streets.  The state of the metropolis then, and even now,
may be assigned as an auxiliary cause of the spread of plague and
cholera; but it must be confessed, there lies at the bottom of these
visitations much of mystery, inexplicable by reference to mere human
agencies.  There is a power at work in the universe deeper far than any
of those which our poor natural philosophy can detect.  Not that these
extraordinary occurrences show us the presence of a Divine providence
which does not operate at other, and at all times; not as if the
mysterious agency of God were sometimes in action, and sometimes in
repose; not as if the Almighty visited the earth yesterday, and left it
to-day; not as if his kingly rule over the world were broken by
interregnums;--by no means; still these events are like the lifting up
of the veil of second causes, and the disclosure of depths of power
down which mortals ought to look with reverence.  They suggest to the
devout solemn views of nature and man--of life and death--of God ruling
over all.  Loudly, also, do they remind us of the malignity of sin, and
the evils which it has brought on a fallen world.  Happy is he who,
amidst desolations such as we have now described, can, through a living
faith in Christ, exclaim, "The Lord is my refuge and fortress: my God;
in him will I trust.  Surely he shall deliver me from the snare of the
fowler, and from the noisome pestilence."



[1] Judge Whitelock came up to London from Buckingham to sit in
Westminster Hall.  He reached Hyde Park Corner on the morning of the
2d, "where he and his retinue dined on the ground, with such meat and
drink as they brought in the coach with them, and afterwards he drove
fast through the streets, which were empty of people and overgrown with
grass, to Westminster Hall, where he adjourned the court, returned to
his coach, and drove away presently out of town."--_Whitelock_, p. 2.




CHAPTER IV.

THE FIRE OF LONDON.

"One woe is past, another woe cometh quickly."  Just a year after the
plague was at its height, the great fire of London occurred.  On
Sunday, September 3d, 1666, soon after midnight, the house of Farryner
the king's baker, near London-bridge, was discovered to be in flames.
Before breakfast time no less than three hundred houses were consumed.
Such a rapid conflagration struck dismay throughout the neighborhood,
and unnerved those who, in the first instance, by prompt measures might
have stayed the mischief.  Charles II., as soon as he heard of what had
happened, displayed a decision, firmness, and humanity, which relieve,
in some degree, the dark shades Of his character and life; and gave
orders to pull down the houses in the vicinity of the fire.  Soon
afterwards he hastened to the scene of danger, in company with his
brother, the duke of York, using prudent measures to check the
conflagration, to help the sufferers, and inspire confidence in the
minds of the people.  But the lord mayor was like one distracted,
uttering hopeless exclamations on receiving the royal message, blaming
the people for not obeying him, and leaving the scene of peril to seek
repose; while the inhabitants ran about raving in despair, and the
fire, which no proper means were employed to quench, went on its own
way, devouring house after house, and street after street.  By Monday
night, the fire had reached to the west as far as the Middle Temple,
and to the east as far as Tower-street.  Fleet-street, Old Bailey,
Ludgate-hill, Warwick-lane, Newgate, Paul's-chain, Watling-street,
Thames-street, and Billingsgate, were destroyed or still wrapped in
flame.

On Tuesday the fire reached the end of Fetter-lane and the entrance to
Smithfield.  Around Cripplegate and the Tower, the devouring element
violently raged, but in other directions it somewhat abated.  Engines
had been employed in pulling down houses, but this process was too slow
to overtake the mischief.  Gunpowder was then used to blow up
buildings, so that large gaps were made, which cut off the edifices
that were burning from those still untouched.  By these means, on the
afternoon of Tuesday, the devastation was curbed.  The brick buildings
of the Temple also checked its progress to the west.  Throughout
Wednesday the efforts of the king and duke, and some of the lords of
the council, were indefatigable.  Indeed, his majesty made the round of
the fire twice a day, for many hours together, both on horseback and on
foot, giving orders to the men who were pulling down houses, and
repaying them on the spot for their toils out of a money-bag which he
carried about with him.  On Thursday, the fire was thought to be quite
extinguished, but in the evening it burst out afresh near the Temple.
Renewed and vigorous efforts at that point, however, soon stayed its
ravages, and in the course of a short time it was finally extinguished.

The space covered with ruins was four hundred and thirty-six acres in
extent.  The boundaries of the conflagration were Temple-bar,
Holborn-bridge, Pye-corner, Smithfield, Aldersgate, Cripplegate, near
the end of Coleman-street, at the end of Basinghall-street, by the
postern at the upper end of Bishopsgate-street, in Leadenhall-street,
by the Standard in Cornhill, at the church in Fenchurch-street, by the
Clothworkers' Hall, at the middle of Mark-lane, and at the Tower-dock.
While four hundred and thirty-six acres were covered with ruins, only
seventy-five remained with the property upon it uninjured.  Four
hundred streets, thirteen thousand houses, eighty-seven parish
churches, and six chapels; St. Paul's Cathedral, the Royal Exchange and
Custom House, Guildhall and Newgate, and fifty-two halls of livery
companies, besides other public buildings, were swept away.  Eleven
millions' value of property the fire consumed, but, through the mercy
of God, only eight lives were lost.

The rapid spread of the devastation may be easily accounted for in the
absence of timely means to stop it.  The buildings were chiefly
constructed of timber, and covered with thatch.  The materials were
rendered even more than commonly combustible by a summer intensely hot
and dry.  Many of the streets were so narrow that the houses facing
each other almost touched at the top.  A strong east wind steadily blew
for three days over the devoted spot, like the blast of a furnace, at
once fanning the flame and scattering firebrands beyond it.  It was
like a fire kindled in an old forest, feeding on all it touched,
curling like a serpent round tree after tree, leaving ashes behind, and
darting on with the speed of lightning to seize on the timber before.

Into the origin of the calamity the strictest investigation was made.
Some ascribed it to incendiaries.  Party spirit led to the accusation
of the papists, as perpetrators of the deed.  One poor man was
executed, on his own confession, of having a hand in it, but under
circumstances which pretty clearly prove that he was a madman, and was
really innocent of the crime of which, through a strange, but not
incredible hallucination of mind, he feigned himself guilty.  Other
persons ascribed it to what would commonly be called an accidental
circumstance--a great stock of fagots in the baker's shop being
kindled, and carelessly left to burn in close contiguity with stores of
pitch and rosin.  Many considered that the providence of Almighty God,
who works out his own wonderful purposes of judgment and mercy by means
which men call accidental, overruled the circumstances out of which the
fire arose, as a source of terrific chastisement for the sins of a
wicked and godless population, who had hardened their necks against
Divine reproof administered to them in another form so shortly before.
A religious sentiment in reference to the visitation took possession of
many minds, habitually undevout; and even Charles himself was heard, we
are told by Clarendon, to "speak with great piety and devotion of the
displeasure that God was provoked to."

Eye-witnesses have left behind them graphic sketches of this spectacle
of terror.  "The burning," says Vincent, in his tract called "God's
Terrible Advice to the City by Plague and Fire,"--"the burning was in
the fashion of a bow; a dreadful bow it was, such as mine eyes never
before had seen--a bow which had God's arrow in it with a flaming
point."  "The cloud of smoke was so great, that travelers did ride at
noon-day some six miles together in the shadow of it, though there were
no other clouds to be seen in the sky."  "The great fury of the fire
was in the broader streets in the midst of the night; it was come down
to Cornhill, and laid it in the dust, and runs along by the stocks, and
there meets with another fire, which came down Threadneedle-street, a
little farther with another which came up from Wallbrook, a little
farther with another which came up from Bucklersbury, and all these
four joining together break into one great flame, at the corner of
Cheapside, with such a dazzling light and burning heat, and roaring
noise by the fall of so many houses together, that was very amazing."
One trembles at the thought of these blazing torrents rolling along the
streets, and then uniting in a point, like the meeting of wild
waters--floods of fire dashing into a common current.  Evelyn observes
that the stones of St. Paul's Cathedral flew about like granadoes, and
the melted lead ran down the pavements in a bright stream, "so that no
horse or man was able to tread on them."  "I saw," he says in his
Diary, "the whole south part of the city burning, from Cheapside to the
Thames, and all along Cornhill, (for it likewise kindled back against
the wind as well as forward,) Tower-street, Fenchurch-street,
Gracechurch-street, and so along to Baynard's Castle, and was taking
hold of St. Paul's Church, to which the scaffolds contributed
exceedingly."  He saw the Thames covered with goods floating, all the
barges and boats laden with such property as the inhabitants had time
and courage to save; while on land the carts were carrying out
furniture and other articles to the fields, which for many miles were
strewed with movables of all sorts, and with tents erected to shelter
the people.  "All the sky," he adds, "was of a fiery aspect, like the
top of a burning oven, and the light seen for above forty miles around
for many nights; the noise and cracking of the impetuous flames, the
shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of
towers, houses, and churches, was like a hideous storm; and the air all
about so hot and inflamed, that at last one was not able to approach
it, so that they were forced to stand still, and let the flames burn
on, which they did for nearly two miles in length and one in breadth.
The clouds also of smoke were dismal, and reached upon computation
nearly fifty miles in length."

A great fire is a most sublime, as well as appalling spectacle, and
generally presents some features of the picturesquely terrible.
Guildhall, built of oak, too solid and old to blaze, became so much
red-hot charcoal, as if it had been a palace of gold, or a building of
burnished brass.  There were circumstances, too, connected with the
destruction of magnificent edifices, full of a sort of poetical
interest.  The flame inwrapped St. Paul's Cathedral, and rent in pieces
the noble portico recently erected, splitting the stones into flakes,
and leaving nothing entire but the inscription on the architrave,
which, without one defaced letter, continued amidst the ruins to
proclaim the builder's name.  In remarkable coincidence with this, at
the same time that the fire entered the Royal Exchange, ran round the
galleries, descended the stairs, compassed the walks, filled the
courts, and rolled down the royal statues from their niches, the figure
of the founder, Sir Thomas Gresham, was left unharmed, as if calmly
surveying the destruction of his own munificent donation to the old
city, and anticipating the certainty of the re-edification of that
monument of his fame, as well as the revival of that commerce, in the
history of which his own is involved.  As we think of this, we call to
mind another interesting incident, which occurred when the building was
burned down a second time in 1838.  Some readers, perhaps, will
remember, that the bells in the tower rang out their last chime to the
tune of "There's na' luck about the house," just as they were on the
point of coming down with a tremendous crash; as though uttering
swanlike notes in death.

The area devastated by the fire may be estimated, if we fancy a line
drawn from Temple Bar to the bottom of Holborn-hill, then through
Smithfield across Aldersgate-street to the end of Coleman-street, then
sweeping round by the end of Bishopsgate and Leadenhall-streets, and
taking a curve till it touches the Tower, the river forming the
southern boundary of this large space.  Within these limits, after the
fire, there arose a new London, of nobler aspect, and formed for
grander destinies than the old one, relieved by that very fire, under
the blessing of Divine Providence, from liability to the recurrence of
the dreadful plague, which had from time to time recruited its
death-dealing energy from the filth of old crowded streets, with all
their noxious exhalations.  If a panic seized the citizens when the
first alarm of the conflagration spread among them, they redeemed their
character by the self-possession and activity which they evinced in
repairing the desolation.  Not desponding, but inspired with the hope
of the future prosperity of their venerable city, they concurred with
king and parliament in the zeal and diligence requisite for the
emergency.  Scarcely were the flames extinguished, when they set to
work planning the restoration.  "Everybody," observes Evelyn, "brings
in his idea; amidst the rest, I presented his majesty my own
conceptions, with a discourse annexed.  It was the second that was seen
within two days after the conflagration, but Dr. Wren had got the start
of me."  This Dr. Wren had been spoken of by the same writer, fourteen
years before, as a miracle of a youth.  Having made wonderful
attainments in science, he had devoted himself with enthusiasm to the
study of architecture, and now, in the wide space in which at once a
full-grown city was to appear, a field presented itself worthy of the
exercise of the greatest powers of art--a field, indeed, which could
rarely in the world's history be looked for.  Doubtless Wren's mind was
all on fire with the grand occasion, and put forth all its marvelous
ability to meet so unparalleled a crisis.  Before the architect's
imagination there rose the view of a city, built with scientific
proportions, with a broad street running in a perfect line from a
magnificent piazza, placed where St. Dunstan's church stands, to
another piazza on Tower-hill, with an intermediate piazza corresponding
with these, from each of which streets should radiate.  Then, on the
top of Ludgate-hill, over which the broad highway was to run, the new
cathedral was to rise, in the midst of a wide open space, displaying to
advantage its colossal form; and on its northern side there was to
branch out, at a narrow angle with the other main thoroughfare, an
avenue of like dimensions, leading to the Royal Exchange--the site, in
fact, (but intended to cover a wider space,) of our present Cheapside.
The Royal Exchange was to be an additional grand centre, adorned with
piazzas, whence a third vast thoroughfare was to sweep along to
Holborn.  All acute angles were to be avoided.  The great openings were
to exhibit graceful curves, parochial edifices were to be conspicuous
and insulated, the halls of the twelve great companies were to be
ranged round Guildhall, and architecture was to do the utmost possible
in every street.  A like vision dawned on the fancy of Sir John Evelyn,
who in this respect was no unworthy compeer of Wren.  But, though the
architect showed the practicability of the scheme, without any loss of
the property, or infringement of the rights of the citizens, their
obstinacy in not allowing the old foundations to be altered, and their
determination not to give up the ground to commissioners for making out
the new streets and sites of buildings, defeated the scheme; "and
thus," writes Wren, (with a deep sigh one thinks he penned the words
while his darling dream melted away,) "the opportunity, in a great
degree, was lost, of making the new city the most magnificent, as well
as commodious for health and trade, of any upon earth."  Sir
Christopher Wren could do nothing as he wished.  The Monument was not
what he meant it to be.  The churches were not placed as he would have
had them, so as to exhibit to advantage their architectural character.
Even St. Paul's was shorn of the glory with which it was enriched in
the architect's mind.  It was narrowed and altered by incompetent
judges, especially the Duke of York, who wished to preserve in it
arrangements convenient for a popish cathedral, which he wildly hoped
it would ultimately become.  When Wren was compelled to give way, he
even shed tears in the bitterness of his disappointment and grief.  He
finally had to do on a large scale, what common minds are ever doing in
their little way--sacrifice some fondly cherished ideal to a stern
necessity.

But, crippled as his genius was by the untoward position in which he
was placed, he accomplished marvelous works of art in the churches so
numerous and varied, built from his designs, and especially in the
grand cathedral, which rises above the rich group of towers, domes,
steeples, and spires, with a lordly air.  It is related, in connection
with the building of St. Dunstan's church in the east, the steeple of
which is constructed upon quadrangular columns, that so anxious was he
respecting the result, that he placed himself on London-bridge,
watching through a lens the effect of removing the temporary
supporters, by the aid of which the building was reared.  The ascent of
a rocket proclaimed the stability of the structure, and Sir Christopher
smiled at the thought of his having for a moment hesitated to trust to
the certainty of mathematical calculations.  Informed one night
afterwards, that a hurricane had damaged all the steeples in London, he
remarked, "Not St. Dunstan's, I am quite sure."  St. Stephen's,
Wallbrook, is  generally considered the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of Sir
Christopher Wren.  "Had the materials and volume," to quote the opinion
of two celebrated architects, "been so durable and extensive as those
of St. Paul's Cathedral, he had consummated a much more efficient
monument to his well-earned fame than that fabric affords."  But the
beauty of the edifice is in the interior.  "Never was so sweet a kernel
in so rough a shell--so rich a jewel in so poor a setting."  The cost
of the fabric was only £7,652. 13_s._  (Cunninghame's Handbook of
London.)

The first stone of St. Paul's was laid on the 21st of June, 1675, by
the architect; and he notices in his Parentalia a little circumstance
connected with the preparations, which was construed by those present
into a favorable omen, and which evidently interested and pleased his
own mind.  When the centre of the dimensions of the great dome was
fixed upon, a man was ordered to bring a flat stone from the heap of
rubbish, to be laid as a mark for the masons.  The piece he happened to
take up for the purpose was the fragment of a grave-stone, with nothing
of the inscription left but the words, "_Resurgam_," "I shall rise
again."  And, true enough, St. Paul's did rise again, with a splendor
which posterity has ever admired.  It is, undoubtedly, the second
church in Christendom of that style of architecture, St. Peter's at
Rome being the first.  Inferior in point of dimensions, and sadly
begrimed with smoke, in contrast with St. Peter's comparatively
untarnished freshness--destitute, too, of its marble linings, gilded
arches, and splendid mosaics'--it is, on the whole, as Eustace, a
critic prejudiced on the side of Rome, acknowledged, a most extensive
and stately edifice: "It fixes the eye of the spectator as he passes
by, and challenges his admiration, and, even next to the Vatican,
though by a long interval, it claims superiority over all the
transalpine churches, and furnishes a just subject of national pride
and exultation."  It was not until 1710 that the building was complete,
when the architect's son laid the topmost stone on the lantern of the
cupola.

In the prospectus published by Evelyn for the rebuilding of London, he
observed, that if the citizens were permitted to gratify their own
fancies, "it might possibly become, indeed, a new, but a very ugly
city, when all was done."  The citizens were permitted to have their
own way, and the result was very much what he anticipated.  The old
sites of streets and public buildings were, to a great extent, adopted.
The former remained narrow, winding, inconvenient--indeed, more
inconvenient than ever; for what might be borne with when even ladies
of quality traveled on horseback, became scarcely endurable when
lumbering coaches were all the fashion.  Churches and other edifices of
importance were planted in inappropriate situations, and were blocked
up by houses and shops.  In Chamberlayne's _Angliæ Notitia_ for 1692,
he laments that within the city the spacious houses of noblemen, rich
merchants, the halls of companies, and the fair taverns, were hidden
from strangers, the room towards the street being reserved for
tradesmen's shops; but from his account and that of others, it appears
plain enough that the men of that day felt that London, as rebuilt
after the fire, was far superior to what it had been in the times of
their fathers.  The old wooden lath and plaster dwellings gave place to
more substantial habitations of brick and stone, and the public
structures appeared to those who were contemporary with their erection,
proud trophies of skill, art, and wealth.  "Notwithstanding," exclaims
the author just noticed, "all these huge losses by fire,
notwithstanding the most devouring pestilence in the year immediately
foregoing, and the then very chargeable war against three potent
neighbors, the citizens, recovering in a few months their native
courage, have since so cheerfully and unanimously set themselves to
rebuild the city, that, (not to mention whole streets built and now
building by others in the suburbs,) within the space of four years,
they erected in the same streets ten thousand houses, and laid out
three millions sterling.  Besides several large hospitals, divers very
stately halls, nineteen fair solid stone churches were all at the same
time erecting, and soon afterwards finished, and now, in the year 1691,
above twenty churches more, of various beautiful and solid architecture
are rebuilt.  Moreover, as if the late fire had only purged the city,
the buildings are becoming infinitely more beautiful."  The author
speaks with immense satisfaction of the new houses, churches, and
halls, richly-adorned shops, chambers, balconies, and portals, carved
work in stone and wood, with pictures and wainscot, not only of fir and
oak, but some with sweet-smelling cedar, the streets paved with stone
and guarded with posts; and ends by observing, that though the king
might not say he found London of brick and left it of marble, he could
say, "I found it wood and left it brick."




CHAPTER V.

FROM THE RESTORATION OF THE CITY TO THE CLOSE OF THE CENTURY.

Great as was the consternation described in the foregoing chapter,
scarcely less terror was produced in the minds of the citizens by the
apprehension of a Dutch invasion about the same time.  In 1666, even
before the fire, this feeling was excited.  The ships of France and
Holland approached the Thames, and engaged with the English fleet.
"After dinner," says Lady Warwick, whose entry in her journal, under
date, July 29, brings the occurrence home to us--"after dinner came the
news of hearing the guns that our fleet was engaged.  My head was much
afflicted by the consideration of the blood that was spilt, and of the
many souls that would launch into eternity."  There is a fine passage,
descriptive of the excitement at this time, in Dryden's Essay on
Poesie: "The noise of the cannon from both navies reached our ears
about the city, so that men being alarmed with it, and in dreadful
suspense of the event, which we knew was then deciding, every one went
following the sound as his fancy led him, and leaving the town almost
empty, some took towards the park, some cross the river, others down
it, all seeking the noise in the depth of the silence.  Taking, then, a
barge, which the servant of Lisidenis had provided for them, they made
haste to shoot the bridge, and left behind them that great fall of
waters, which hindered them from hearing what they desired; after
which, having disengaged themselves from many vessels which rode in
anchor in the Thames, and almost blocked up the passage to Greenwich,
they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently; and then
every one favoring his own curiosity with a strict silence, it was not
long ere they perceived the air breaking about them, like the noise of
distant thunder, or of swallows in the chimney, those little
undulations of sound, though almost vanishing before they reached them,
yet still seeming to retain somewhat of their first horror, which they
had betwixt the fleets.  After they had listened till such time as the
sound, by little and little, went from them, Eugenius, lifting up his
head, and taking notice of it, was the first who congratulated to the
rest that happy omen of our nation's victory, adding, we had but this
to desire in confirmation of it, that we might hear no more of that
noise, which was now leaving the English coast."  This passage, which
Montgomery eulogizes most warmly in his Lectures on English Poetry, as
one of the most magnificent in our language, places before us, with
graphic force, the state of curiosity, suspense, and solicitude, which
was experienced by multitudes of citizens at the period referred to.

In the following year, fresh excitement from the same source arose.
The monarch was wasting upon his pleasures a considerable portion of
the money which parliament had voted for the defence of the kingdom.
The national exchequer was empty, and the credit of the navy
commissioners gone.  No loans could be obtained, yet ready money was
demanded by the laborers required in the dockyards, by the sailors who
were wanted to man the vessels, and by the merchants from whose stores
the fleet needed its provisions.  Not a gun was mounted in Tilbury
Fort, nor a ship of war was in the river ready to oppose the enemy,
while crowds thronged about the Admiralty, demanding their pay, and
justly upbraiding the government.  The Dutch ships, under De Ruyter,
entered the Thames, sailed up the Medway, and seized the Royal Charles,
besides three first-rate English vessels.  One can easily conceive the
second panic which this event must have produced among the citizens;
nor is it difficult to imagine the suspension of business, the general
exchange of hasty inquiries in that hour of terror, and the flocking of
the people to the river-side to learn tidings of the fleet.  Though the
Dutch ships, unable to do further mischief on that occasion, returned
to join the rest of the naval force anchored off the Nore; yet the
citizens could not be relieved from their anxiety by this circumstance,
for they knew that the foe would remain hovering about their coasts,
and they could not tell but that in some unlooked-for moment the
invaders might approach the very walls of their city.  Some weeks of
painful apprehension followed, and twice again did the admiral threaten
to remount the Thames.  An engagement between the English squadron and
a portion of the invading armament of Holland prevented the
accomplishment of that design, and saved London for the present from
further fear.

Strong political excitement was produced in the city of London, at a
later period of Charles II.'s reign, by another kind of invasion.  The
monarch and court, finding themselves thwarted in their arbitrary
system of government by the spirit of the citizens, who were jealous of
their own liberties, ventured, in defiance of the national constitution
and the charters of the city, to interfere in the municipal elections.
They attempted to thrust on the people as sheriffs men whom they knew
they could employ as tools for despotic purposes.  In 1681, a violent
attempt of this sort was made, when the city returned in opposition to
the wishes of king and court, two patriotic and popular men, Thomas
Pilkington and Samuel Shaw.  The king could not conceal his chagrin at
this election, and when invited to dine with the citizens, replied,
"Mr. Recorder, an invitation from the lord mayor and the city is very
acceptable to me, and to show that it is so, notwithstanding that it is
brought by messengers so unwelcome to me as those two sheriffs are, yet
I accept it."  Many of the citizens about the same time, influenced by
fervent Protestant zeal, and by attachment to the civil and religious
liberties of the country, were apprehensive of the consequences if the
Duke of York, known to be a Roman Catholic, were allowed to ascend the
British throne.  The anti-papal feelings of the nation had been
increased by the belief of a deeply-laid popish plot, which the
infamous Titus Oates pretended to reveal; and in London those
sentiments had been rendered still more intense by the murder of Sir
Edmondbury Godfery, the magistrate who received Oates's depositions.
His death, over which a large amount of mystery still rests, was
attributed to the revenge of the papists for the part he had taken in
the prosecution against them.  The hatred of which, in general, Roman
Catholics were the objects, centered on the prince, from whose
succession to the crown the restoration of the old religion of the
country was anticipated.  His name became odious, and it was difficult
to shield it from popular indignity.  Some one cut and mangled a
picture of him which hung in Guildhall.  The corporation, to prevent
his royal highness from supposing that they countenanced or excused the
insult, offered a large reward for the detection of the offender, and
the Artillery Company invited the prince to a city banquet.  The party
most active in opposing his succession determined to have a large
meeting and entertainment of their own, to express their opinion on the
vital point of the succession to the crown; but the proceeding was
sternly forbidden by the court, a circumstance which only served to
deepen the feelings of discontent already created to a serious extent
in very many breasts.  This was followed up by the lord mayor
nominating, in the year 1682, a sheriff favorable to the royal
interests, and intimating to the citizens that they were to confirm his
choice.  The uproar at the common hall on Midsummer-day was tremendous.
The citizens contended for their right of election, and nominated both
sheriffs themselves, selecting two persons of popular sentiments.
Amidst the riot, the lord mayor was roughly treated, and consequently
complained to his majesty, the result of which was, that the two
sheriffs already in office, and obnoxious to the court, were committed
to the Tower for not maintaining the peace.  Papillion and Dubois, the
people's candidates, were elected.  The privy council annulled the
election, and commanded another; when the lord mayor most arbitrarily
declared North and Box, the court candidates, duly chosen.  Court and
city were now pledged to open conflict; the former pursuing thoroughly
despotic measures to bring the latter to submission.  One rich popular
citizen was fined to the amount of £100,000, for an alleged scandal on
the popish duke, and at length it was resolved to take away the city
charter.  Forms of law were adopted for the purpose.  An information,
technically entitled a _quo warranto_, was brought against the
corporation in the court of King's Bench.  It was alleged, in support
of this suit at the instance of the crown, that the common council had
imposed certain tolls by an ordinance of their own, and had presented
and published throughout the country an insolent petition to the king,
in 1679, for the calling of parliament.  The court, swayed by a desire
to please the king, pronounced judgment against the corporation, and
declared their charter forfeited; yet only recorded that judgment, as
if to inveigle the corporation into some kind of voluntary submission,
as the price of preserving a portion of what they were now on the point
of altogether losing.  Such an issue, of course, was regarded by the
court as more desirable than an act of direct force, which was likely
to irritate the citizens, and arouse wrath, which might be treasured up
against another day.  The city, to save their estates, yielded to the
law, and submitted to the conditions imposed by the king--namely, that
no mayor, sheriff, recorder, or other chief officer, should be admitted
until approved by the king; that in event of his majesty's twice
disapproving the choice of the citizens, he should himself nominate a
person to fill the office, without waiting for another election; that
the court of aldermen might, with the king's permission, remove any one
of their body, and that they should have a negative on the election of
the common council, and, in case of disapproving a second choice on the
part of the citizens, should themselves proceed to nominate such as
they themselves approved.  "The city was of course absolutely
subservient to the court from this time to the revolution."  (Hallam's
Constitutional History, chap. ii, p. 146.)

The unconstitutional proceedings of the king and court, of which the
circumstances just related are a specimen, aroused some patriotic
spirits in the country; but the power which inspired their indignation
crushed their energies.  Two illustrious men, who fell victims to that
power, were connected with the city of London as the place of their
abode, and the scene where they sealed their principles by death.
Russell and Sydney both perished there in 1683.  They were accused of
participation in the notorious Rye House plot, and upon evidence, such
as would convince no jury in the present day, were found guilty of
treason.  Lord Russell was conveyed from Newgate on the 21st of July,
1683, to be beheaded in Lincoln's-inn-fields.  The duke of York, who
intensely hated the patriot, wished him to be executed in
Southampton-square, before his own residence; but the king, says
Burnet, "rejected that as indecent."  Lord Russell's behavior on the
scaffold was in keeping with his previous piety and fortitude.  "His
whole behavior looked like a triumph over death."  He said, the day
before he died, that the sins of his youth lay heavy on his mind, but
he hoped God had forgiven them, for he was sure he had forsaken them,
and for many years had walked before God with a sincere heart.  The
faithful lady Rachel, who had so nobly acted as his secretary on his
trial, and had used her utmost efforts to save his life, attended him
in prison, and sought to strengthen his mind with the hopes and
consolations of the gospel of Christ.  Late the last night he spent on
earth their final separation in this world took place; when, after
tenderly embracing her several times, both magnanimously suppressing
their indescribable emotions, he exclaimed, as she left the cell, "The
bitterness of death is past."  Winding up his watch the next morning,
he observed, "I have done with time, and am going to eternity."  He
earnestly pressed upon Lord Cavendish the importance of religion, and
declared how much comfort and support he derived from it in his
extremity.  Some among the crowds that filled the streets wept, while
others insulted; he was touched by the tenderness of the one party,
without being provoked by the heartlessness of the other.  Turning into
Little Queen-street, he said, "I have often turned to the other hand
with great comfort, but now I turn to this with greater."  "A tear or
two" fell from his eyes as he uttered the words.  He sang psalms a
great part of the way, and said he hoped to sing better soon.  On being
asked what he was singing, he said, the beginning of the 119th Psalm.
On entering Lincoln's-inn-fields, the sins of his youth were brought to
his remembrance, as he had there indulged in those vices which
characterized the court of Charles II.  "This has been to me a place of
sinning, and God now makes it the place of my punishment."  As he
observed the great crowds assembled to witness his end, he remarked, "I
hope I shall quickly see a better assembly."  He walked round the
scaffold several times, and then delivered to the sheriffs a paper,
which had been carefully prepared, declaring his innocence of the
charge of treason, and his strong attachment to the Protestant faith.
After this, he prayed by himself, and then Dr. Tillotson prayed with
him.  Another private prayer, and the patriot, having calmly unrobed
himself, as if about to lie down on his couch to sleep, placed his head
upon the block, and with two strokes of the axe was hastened into the
eternal world.  The faith, hope, patience, and love of his illustrious
lady surpassed even his own, and her letters breathe a spirit redolent
of heaven rather than earth.  After a severe illness, she wrote, in
October, 1680: "I hope this has been a sorrow I shall profit by; I
shall, if God will strengthen my faith, resolve to return him a
constant praise, and make this the season to chase all secret murmurs
from grieving my soul for what is past, letting it rejoice in what it
should rejoice--His favor to me, in the blessings I have left, which
many of my betters want, and yet have lost their chiefest friend also.
But, O! the manner of my deprivation is yet astonishing."  Five years
afterwards she says, "My friendships have made all the joys and
troubles of my life, and yet who would live and not love?  Those who
have tried the insipidness of it would, I believe, never choose it.
Mr. Waller says--

  'What know we of the bless'd above.
  But that they sing, and that they love!'

And 'tis enough; for if there is so charming a delight in the love, and
suitableness in humors, to creatures, what must it be to the clarified
spirits to love in the presence of God!"

Algernon Sydney was a man of very powerful mind and of great eloquence,
in these respects utterly eclipsing his noble compatriot; but in his
last days it is painful to miss that Christian faith, tenderness of
heart, and beautiful religious hope, which shone with such serene
brightness amidst the sorrows of his friend.  Sydney was a staunch
republican, and his patriotism was cast in the hard and severe mould of
ancient Rome.  He was another Brutus.  This distinguished man was
executed on Tower-hill, December the 7th, 1683, and faced death with
the utmost indifference, not seeking any aid from the ministers of
religion in his last moments, nor addressing the assembled multitude,
but only remarking to those who stood by that he had made his peace
with God, and had nothing to say to man.

Another sufferer in the same cause, less known to history, but more
closely connected with London, was alderman Cornish.  From his great
zeal in the cause of Protestantism, he had become peculiarly odious to
the reigning powers.  He was suddenly accused of treason, and hurried
to Newgate on the 13th of October.  On the following Saturday he
received notice of his indictment, and the next Monday was arraigned at
the bar.  Having been denied time to prepare his defence, he was
completely in the hands of his persecutors, who wreaked on him their
vengeance with merciless intensity and haste.  On the 23d of the same
month, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered, in front of his own house,
at the end of King-street, Cheapside.  After his death his innocency
was established, and it is said that James, who now occupied the
throne, lamented the injustice he had done.  The duke of Monmouth, the
king's nephew, perished on Tower-hill, July, 1685, for his rebellion in
the western counties.  The awful tragedy of an execution, with which
the citizens had become so familiar, was in this instance rendered
additionally horrid by the circumstance that the headsman, after
several ineffectual attempts to decapitate his victim, who, with the
gashes in his neck, reproached him for his tardiness, flung down the
axe, declaring he could not go on; forced by the sheriffs, the man at
length fulfilled his bloody task.

The arbitrary and cruel government of the country for many years was
now on the point of working out its remedy.  The trial and acquittal of
the seven bishops at Westminster hastened on a crisis, and nothing
could exceed the joy which the city evinced on that occasion.  On their
way to the Tower by water, the most enthusiastic demonstrations of
sympathy were evinced by the multitudes who lined the banks of the
Thames, and on reaching the fortress itself, the garrison knelt and
begged their blessing.  Their subsequent discharge on bail, and
especially their final acquittal, excited boundless joy throughout the
city, and were celebrated by bonfires and illuminations.  The king,
observing the tide of popular feeling set in so decidedly against him,
endeavored to reconcile the city of London by restoring to it the
charter, which, in his brother's reign, had been so unjustly taken
away.  But though this brought votes of thanks in return, it
established no confidence towards the sovereign on the part of the
people.  The prince of Orange, invited over by several distinguished
persons, wearied by the long continuance of tyranny, landed at Torbay,
when James, having committed the care of the metropolis to the lord
mayor, marched forth to meet his formidable rival.  The result belongs
to the history of England.  The lords spiritual and temporal held one
of their important meetings, during the interregnum, at Guildhall, and
summoned to it the chief magistrate and aldermen.  Judge Jeffreys, of
infamous memory, was brought before the lord mayor, and committed to
the Tower, where he died through excessive drinking.  Disturbances
broke out in the city, and the populace plundered the houses of the
papists.  The mayor, aldermen, and a deputation from the common
council, were summoned to attend the convention parliament, which
raised the prince of Orange to the throne.  These are the principal
incidents in the history of London, as connected with the glorious
revolution of 1688.

William and Mary were soon welcomed by the citizens to a very splendid
entertainment, the usual token of loyalty offered by them to new
sovereigns; and no time was lost by their majesties in reversing the
_quo warranto_, and fully restoring to the city its ancient charter.
When a conspiracy against William was discovered, in 1692, the city
train bands displayed their loyalty, and marched to Hyde Park to be
reviewed by the queen; and again, when an assassination plot was
detected, an association was formed among the citizens to defend his
person.  These occurrences, with sundry rejoicings and entertainments
upon the king's return to this country, after the Irish and foreign
campaigns in which he engaged, are the principal civic events connected
with the reign of William III.

On turning from the political history of London to look at the manners
and morals of society during the latter part of the seventeenth
century, our attention is immediately arrested by the scenes at
Whitehall during the reign of Charles II.  There the monarch fixed his
court, gathering around him some of the most profligate persons of the
age, and freely indulging in the most criminal pleasures.  The palace
was adorned with the greatest splendor, the ceilings and walls being
decorated, and the furniture and other ornaments being fashioned
according to the French taste, as it then prevailed under Louis XIV.
Courtiers and idlers here flocked together from day to day, to lounge
in the galleries, to talk over public news and private scandal, and to
listen to the tales and jests of the king, whose presence was very
accessible, and whose wit and familiarity with his courtiers made him a
great favorite.  Banquets, balls, and gambling, formed the amusements
of the evening, often disgraced by open licentiousness.  "I can never
forget," says Evelyn, "the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming
and all dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfulness of God, (it
being Sunday evening,) which this day se'nnight I was witness of."
This was at the close of the sovereign's wretched career.  "Six days
after," adds the writer, "was all in the dust!"  This passage cannot
but call up in the Christian mind, awful thoughts of the eternal
condition of such as spend their days in the pleasures of sin, and then
drop into that invisible world, on the brink of which they were all
along "sporting themselves with their own deceivings."  Sinful
practices, such as stained the court of Charles II., are too often
attempted to be disguised under palliative terms; but the solemn
warning of Scripture remains, "Let no man deceive you with vain words,
for because of these things cometh the wrath of God on the children of
disobedience."  It is pleasing here to remember, that among those whom
their dignified station, or their duties towards the sovereign and
royal family, brought more or less into contact with the court, there
were persons of a very different character from the gay circle around
them, and whose thoughts, amidst the most brilliant spectacles, were
lifted up to objects that are beyond earthly vision.  "In the morning,"
says lady Warwick, in her diary, April 23, 1667, "as soon as dressed,
in a short prayer I committed my soul to God, then went to Whitehall,
and dined at my lord chamberlain's, then went to see the celebration of
St. George's feast, which was a very glorious sight.  Whilst I was in
the Banqueting House, hearing the trumpets sounding, in the midst of
all that great show God was pleased to put very mortifying thoughts
into my mind, and to make me consider, what if the trump of God should
now sound?--which thought did strike me with some seriousness, and made
me consider in what glory I had in that very place seen the late king,
and yet out of that very place he was brought to have his head cut off.
And I had also many thoughts how soon all that glory might be laid in
the dust, and I did in the midst of it consider how much greater glory
was provided for a poor sincere child of God.  I found, blessed be God!
that my heart was not at all taken with anything I saw, but esteemed it
not worth the being taken with."--_Lady Warwick's Memoirs_.  Lady
Godolphin was another beautiful instance of purity and piety amidst
scenes of courtly splendor, and manifold temptations to worldliness and
vice; and the more remarkable in this respect, that her duties required
her frequent attendance at Whitehall, and brought her into close
contact with the perils of the place.

The parks were favorite places of resort.  "Hyde Park," observes a
cotemporary writer, "every one knows is the promenade of London;
nothing was so much in fashion during the fine weather as that
promenade, which was the rendezvous of magnificence and beauty; every
one, therefore, who had a splendid equipage, constantly repaired
thither, and the king seemed pleased with the place.  Coaches with
glasses were then a late invention; the ladies were afraid of being
shut up in them."  Charles was fond of walking in the parks, which he
did with such rapidity, and for such a length of time as to wear out
his courtiers.  He once said to prince George of Denmark, who was
corpulent, "Walk with me, and hunt with my brother, and you will not
long be distressed with growing fat."  Playing with dogs, feeding
ducks, and chatting with people, were occupations the king was much
addicted to, and were thought by his subjects to be so condescending,
familiar, and kind, that they tended much to promote his personal
popularity with the London citizens and others.  Along St. James's
Park, at the back of what are now Carlton Gardens, there ran a wall,
which formed the boundary of the king's garden.  On the north side of
it was an avenue, with rows of elms on one side, and limes on the
other, the one sheltering a carriage road, the other a foot-path.
Between lay an open space, called Pall Mall, which designation was
derived from a game played there, consisting of striking a ball through
an iron hoop suspended on a lofty pole.  This was a favorite sport in
the days of Charles, and many a gay young cavalier exercised himself,
and displayed his dexterity among those green shades, where now piles
of houses line the busy street, still retaining the name it bore nearly
two centuries ago.

The pleasures of the parks and Whitehall, with all the licentious
accompaniments of the latter, were not always enough to meet the
vitiated appetite for amusement which then prevailed among the
courtiers.  Lord Rochester--whose end formed such a striking contrast
to his life; whose sorrow for his sins was so intense, and his desire
for forgiveness and spiritual renewal so earnest--was prominent in
these extravagances, and set himself up in Tower-street as an Italian
mountebank, professing to effect extraordinary cures.  Sometimes, also,
he went about in the attire of a porter or beggar.  This taste was
cherished and indulged by the highest personages.  "At this time,"
(1668,) says Burnet, "the court fell into much extravagance in
masquerading; both the king and queen and all the court went about
masked, and came into houses unknown, and danced there with a great
deal of wild frolic.  In all this people were so disguised, that
without being in the secret none could distinguish them.  They were
carried about in hackney chairs.  Once the queen's chairman, not
knowing who she was, went from her.  So she was alone, and was much
disturbed, and came to Whitehall in a hackney coach; some say a cart."
Scenes of dissipation at Whitehall, with occasional excesses of the
kind just noticed, make up the history of the court at London during
the reign of Charles II.  The palace, under his brother James, who,
with all his popish zeal, was far from a pure and virtuous man, though
cleansed from some of its pollution, was still the witness of lax
morals.  The habits of William III. and his queen Mary, greatly changed
the aspect of things at Whitehall, till its destruction by fire, (the
Banqueting House excepted,) in the year 1691.  Afterwards the royal
residence was either at Kensington or Hampton Court.

The riotous pleasures of Charles II. and his favorites, naturally
encouraged imitation among the citizens of London, and during the whole
reign of Charles it was full of scenes of revelry.  The excesses which
had been restrained during the commonwealth, and the abandoned
characters who, to escape the churchwardens and other censors of public
morals, sought refuge in retired haunts of villany, now appeared in
open day.  The restoration had introduced a sort of saturnalia; and no
wonder, then, that the event was annually celebrated by the lovers of
frivolous pleasure in London, with the gayest rejoicings, in which the
garland and the dance bore a conspicuous part.  While habits of
dissipation were too common among the inhabitants generally, vice and
crime were encouraged among the abandoned classes, by the existence of
privileged places, such as Whitefriars, the Savoy, Fuller's Rents, and
the Minories, where men who had lost all character and credit took
refuge, and carried on with impunity their nefarious practices.  Other
persons, also, who ranked with decent London tradesmen, would sometimes
avail themselves of these spots; and we are informed that even late in
the seventeenth century, men in full credit used to buy all the goods
they could lay their hands on, and carry them directly to Whitefriars,
and then sending for their creditors, insult them with the exhibition
of their property, and the offer of some miserable composition in
return.  If they refused the compromise, they were set at defiance.

The flood of licentiousness which rolled through the city in the time
of Charles II. happily proved insufficient to break down the religious
character of a large number of persons, who had been trained under the
faithful evangelical ministry of earlier times, or had been impressed
by the teaching of earnest-minded preachers and pastors who still
remained.  The fire, as well as the plague, in connection with the
fidelity of some of God's servants, was, no doubt, instrumental, under
the blessing of his Holy Spirit, in turning the hearts of many from
darkness to light.  The black cloud, as Janeway calls it, which no wind
could blow over, till it fell in such scalding drops, also folded up in
its skirts treasures of mercy for some, whose souls had been
unimpressed by milder means.

By the Act of Uniformity many devoted ministers had been silenced in
London--Richard Baxter, among the rest, whose sermons had attracted, as
they well might, the most crowded auditories;[1] but in private they
continued to do the work of their heavenly Master; and when spaces of
toleration occurred in the persecuting reigns of Charles and James II.,
they opened places of worship, and discharged their holy functions with
happy effects on their numerous auditories.  After the fire, they were
for a little time in the enjoyment of this privilege; but, in 1670, an
act was passed for the suppression of conventicles, and the buildings
were forthwith converted into tabernacles, for the use of the
establishment while the parish churches were rebuilding.  Eight places
of this description are mentioned, of which may be noticed the
meeting-house of the excellent Mr. Vincent, in Hand-alley,
Bishopsgate-street, a large room, with three galleries, thirty large
pews, and many benches and forms; and also Mr. Doolittle's
meeting-house, built of brick, with three galleries, full of large pews
below.  Dr. Manton, a celebrated Presbyterian divine, was apprehended
on a Sunday afternoon, at the close of his sermon, and committed a
prisoner to the Gate-house.  His meeting-house in White-yard was broken
up, and a fine of £40 imposed on the people, and £20 on the minister.
It is related of James Janeway, that as he was walking by the wall at
Rotherhithe, a bullet was fired at him; and that a mob of soldiers once
broke into his meeting house in Jamaica-row, and leaped upon the
benches.  Amidst the confusion, some of his friends threw over him a
colored coat, and placed a white hat on his head, to facilitate his
escape.  Once, while preaching in a gardener's house, he was surprised
by a band of troopers, when, throwing himself on the ground, some
persons covered him with cabbage leaves, and so preserved him from his
enemies.  (Spiritual Heroes, p. 313.)  In secresy the good people often
met to worship, according to the dictates of their consciences; and
until lately there remained in the ruins of the old priory of
Bartholomew, in Smithfield, doors in the crypt, which tradition
reported to have been used for admission into the gloomy subterranean
recesses, where the persecuted ones, like the primitive Christians in
the catacombs of Rome, worshiped the Father through Jesus Christ.  The
Friends, or Quakers, as they were termed, at this time manifested great
intrepidity, and continued their worship as before, not stirring at the
approach of the officers who came to arrest them, but meekly going all
together to prison, where they stayed till they were dismissed, for
they would not pay the penalties imposed on them, nor even the jail
fees.  On being discharged, they went to their meeting-houses as
before, and finding them closed, crowded in the street around the door,
saying "they would not be ashamed nor afraid to disown their meeting
together in a peaceable manner to worship God, but in imitation of the
prophet Daniel, they would do it more publicly because they were
forbid."  _Neale's Puritans_, vol. iv, p. 433.  William Penn and
William Mead, two distinguished members of the Society of Friends, were
tried at the Old Bailey in 1670, and were cruelly insulted by the
court.  The jury, not bringing in such a harsh verdict as was desired,
were threatened with being locked up without "meat, drink, fire, or
tobacco."  "We are a peaceable people, and cannot offer violence to any
man," said Penn; adding, as he turned to the jury, "You are Englishmen,
mind your privileges, give not away your rights."  They responded to
the noble appeal, and acquitted the innocent prisoners.

When, in the next year, Charles exercised a dispensing power, and set
aside the persecuting acts, wishing to give freedom to the papists,
most of the London nonconformist ministers took out licences, and great
numbers attended their meetings.  In 1672, the famous Merchants'
Lecture was set up in Pinner's Hall, and the most learned and popular
of the dissenting divines were appointed to deliver it.  Alderman Love,
member for the city, in the name of such as agreed with him, stood up
in the House of Commons, refusing to take the benefit of the dispensing
power as unconstitutional.  He said, "he had rather go without his own
desired liberty than have it in a way so destructive of the liberties
of his country and the Protestant interest, and that this was the sense
of the main body of dissenters."  The indulgence was withdrawn.
Toleration bills failed in the House of Commons.  The Test Act was
brought in; fruitless attempts were made for a comprehension; and
London was once more a scene of persecution.  Informers went abroad,
seeking out places where nonconformists were assembled, following them
to their homes, taking down their names, ascertaining suspected
parties, listening to private conversation, prying into domestic
scenes, and then delivering over their prey into the hands of miscalled
officers of justice, who exacted fines, and rifled their goods, or
carried them off to prison.  Such proceedings occurred at several
periods in the reigns of Charles and James II., after which the
revolution of 1688 brought peace and freedom of worship to the
long-oppressed nonconformists in London and throughout the country.

Popery lifted up its head in London on the restoration of Charles II.
Many professors of it accompanied the king on his accession to the
throne, and crowded round the court, being treated with conspicuous
favor.  The queen-mother came from France, and took up her abode at
Somerset House, where she gathered round her a number of Roman Catholic
priests.  The foreign ambassadors' chapels were used by English
papists, who thus obtained liberty of worship, while the London
Protestant nonconformists were shamefully persecuted.  Jesuit schools
and seminaries were established, under royal patronage, and popish
bishops were consecrated in the royal chapel of St. James's.  At
Whitehall, the ecclesiastics appeared in their canonical habits, and
were encouraged in their attempts to proselyte the people to the
unreformed faith.  A diarist of the times, under date January 23, 1667,
records a visit he paid to the popish establishment in St. James's
Palace, composed of the chaplains and priests connected with Catharine
of Braganza, Charles II.'s queen: "I saw the dormitory and the cells of
the priests, and we went into one--a very pretty little room, very
clean, hung with pictures, and set with books.  The priest was in his
cell, with his hair-clothes to his skin, barelegged, with a sandal only
on, and his little bed without sheets, and no feather bed, but yet I
thought soft enough, his cord about his middle; but in so good company,
living with ease, I thought it a very good life.  A pretty library they
have: and I was in the refectory where every man had his napkin, knife,
cup of earth, and basin of the same; and a place for one to sit and
read while the rest are at meals.  And into the kitchen I went, where a
good neck of mutton at the fire, and other victuals boiling--I do not
think they fared very hard.  Their windows all looking into a fine
garden and the park, and mighty pretty rooms all.  I wished myself one
of the Capuchins."

But it does not appear that the London commonalty were infected with
the love of the Papal Church, whatever might be done at court to foster
it.  On the contrary, a strong feeling was cherished by multitudes in
opposition to all the popish proceedings of their superiors.
Ebullitions of popular sentiment on the question frequently appeared,
especially in the annual burning of the pope's effigy, on the 17th of
November, at Temple Bar.  This was to celebrate the accession of Queen
Elizabeth; and after the discovery of the so-called Meal Tub plot, in
the reign of Charles II., it was performed with increased parade and
ceremony.  The morning was ushered in with the ringing of bells, and in
the evening a procession took place, by the light of flambeaux, to the
number of some thousands.  The balconies, and windows, and tops of
houses, were crowded with eager faces, reflecting the light that blazed
up from the moving crowds along the streets.  Mock friars, bishops, and
cardinals, with the pope, headed by a man on horseback, personating the
dead body of Sir Edmondbury Godfery, composed the spectacle.  It
started from Bishopsgate, and passing along Cheapside and Fleet-street
terminated at Temple Bar, where the pope was cast into a bonfire, and
the whole concluded with a display of fireworks.  While anti-popish
proceedings of this description might be leavened with much of the
ignorance and intolerance which mark the odious system thus assailed,
and can, therefore, be regarded with little satisfaction, it must be
remembered that there was abundant cause at that time for those who
prized the liberties of their country, as well as those who valued the
truths of religion, to regard with alarm and to resist with vigor the
incursions of a political Church, which sought to crush those
liberties, and to darken those truths.  The evils of Popery, inherent
and unchangeable, obtruded themselves most offensively, and with a
threatening aspect, at a period when they were defended and maintained
in high places; and it was notorious that the successor to the English
crown was plotting for the revival of Popish ascendency.  During the
reign of James II., the grounds of excitement became stronger than
before.  Everything dear to Englishmen as well as Protestants was at
stake.  The destinies of Church and state, of religion and civil
policy, were trembling in the balance.  Men's hearts might well fail
them for fear, and only confidence in the power of truth, and the God
of truth, with earnest prayer for his gracious succor and protection,
could still and soothe their agitated bosoms.  Weapons of the right
kind were employed.  The best divines of the Church of England manfully
contended in argument against the baneful errors of Romanism.
Dissenting divines, especially Baxter, threw their energies into the
same conflict.  Political measures were also adopted vigorously and
with decision--their nature we can neither criticise nor describe--and
through the good providence of God our fathers were delivered from an
impending curse, which we pray may neither in our times, nor in future
ages, light on our beloved land.

In approaching the termination of this chapter, it is desirable to
insert some account of the extent and state of buildings in London at
the close of the seventeenth century, and a few notices of other
matters relating to that period, which have not yet come under our
consideration.  Chamberlayne, in his _Angliæ Notitia_, 1692, dwells
with warm delight upon the description of the London squares, "those
magnificent piazzas," as he terms them; and then enumerates
Lincoln's-inn-fields, Convent Garden, St. James's-square,
Leicester-fields, Southampton-square, Red Lion-square, Golden-square,
Spitalfields-square, and "that excellent new structure, called the
King's-square," now Soho.  These were all extramural, and beyond the
liberties of the municipality, and they show how the metropolis was
extending, especially in the western direction.  As early as 1662, an
act was passed for paving Pall Mall, the Haymarket, and St.
James's-street.  Clarendon, in 1604, built his splendid mansion in
Piccadilly, called in reproach Dunkirk House by the common people, who
"were of opinion that he had a good bribe for the selling of that
town."  Others, says Burnet, called it Holland House, because he was
believed to be no friend to the war.  It was much praised for its
magnificence, and for the beautiful country prospect it commanded.
Evelyn's record of an interview with the builder of the proud palace,
is an affecting illustration of the vanity of this world's grandeur,
and of the disappointments and mortifications that follow ambition.
Clarendon had lost the favor of his sovereign, and the confidence of
the public.  "I found him in his garden," says Evelyn, "at his
new-built palace, sitting in his gout wheel-chair, and seeing the gates
set up towards the north and the fields.  He looked and spake very
disconsolately.  After some while, deploring his condition to me, I
took my leave.  Next morning, I heard he was gone." The house was
afterwards pulled down.  In 1668, Burlington House was finished, placed
where it is because it was at the time of its erection thought certain
that no one would build beyond it.  "In London," says Sir William
Chambers, "many of our noblemen's palaces towards the streets look like
convents; nothing appears but a high wall, with one or two large gates,
in which there is a hole for those who are privileged to go in and out.
If a coach arrives, the whole gate is open indeed, but this is an
operation that requires time, and the porter is very careful to shut it
up again immediately, for reasons to him very weighty.  Few in this
vast city suspect, I believe, that behind an old brick wall in
Piccadilly there is one of the finest pieces of architecture in
Europe."  All to the west and north of Burlington House was park and
country, where huntsmen followed the chase, or fowlers plied their
toils with gun and net, or anglers wielded rod and line on the margin
of fair ponds of water.  "We should greatly err," observes Mr.
Macaulay, "if we were to suppose that any of the streets and squares
then wore the same appearance as at present.  The great majority of the
houses, indeed, have since that time been wholly or in part rebuilt.
If the most fashionable parts of the capital could be placed before us,
such as they then were, we should be disgusted with their squalid
appearance, and poisoned by their noisome atmosphere.  In Convent
Garden a filthy and noisy market was held, close to the dwellings of
the great.  Fruit women screamed, carters fought, cabbage stalks and
rotten apples accumulated in heaps, at the thresholds of the countess
of Berkshire and of the bishop of Durham."  Shops in those days did not
present the bravery of plate glass and bold inscriptions, with all
sorts of devices, but exhibited small windows, with huge frames which
concealed rather than displayed the wares within; while all manner of
signs, including Saracens' heads, blue bears, golden lambs, and
terrific griffins, with other wonders, swung on projecting irons across
the street, an humble resemblance of the row of banners lining the
chapels of the Garter and the Bath, at Windsor and Westminster.  Though
a general paving and cleansing act for the streets of London was passed
in 1671, they continued long afterwards in a deplorably filthy
condition, the inconvenience occasioned by day being greatly increased
at night by the dense darkness, at best but miserably alleviated by the
few candles set up in compliance with the watchman's appeal, "Hang out
your lights."  Glass lamps, known by the name of convex lights, were
introduced into use in 1694, and continued to be employed for
twenty-one years, after which there was a relapse into the old system.
It was dangerous to go abroad after dark without a lantern, and the
streets, with a few wayfarers, guided by this humble illumination, must
have presented a spectacle not unlike some gloomy country path, with
here and there a traveler.

Inns, of course, which still wore the appearance of the old hotels, and
have left a relic for example in the yard of the Spread Eagle, and a
more notable one in that of the Talbot, Southwark, had their
conspicuous signs, including animals known and unknown, and heads
without end.  From their huge and hospitable gateways all the public
conveyances of London took their departure; and in an alphabetical list
of these, in 1684, the daily outgoings average forty-one, but the
numbers in one day are very unequal to those in another, seventy-one
departing on a Thursday, and only nine on a Tuesday.  As there was only
one conveyance at a time to the same place, we have a remarkable
illustration in this record of the public provision for traveling, as
well as the stay-at-home habits of our good forefathers of the middle
class, about a century and a half ago.  The gentry and nobility were
the chief travelers, and they performed their expeditions on horseback,
or in their own coaches.  As to the number of the inhabitants in
London, at the close of the century, only an approximation to the fact
can be made, for no census of the population was taken.  According to
the number of deaths, it is computed there were about half a million of
souls--a population seventeen times larger than that of the second town
in the kingdom, three times greater than that of Amsterdam, and more
than those of Paris and Rome, or Paris and Rouen put together.  Though
the amount of trade was small compared with what it is now, yet the sum
of more than thirty thousand a year, in the shape of customs, (it is
more than eleven millions now,) filled our ancestors with astonishment.
Writers of that day speak of the masts of the ships in the river as
resembling a forest, and of the wealth of the merchants, according to
the notions of the day, as princelike.  More men, wrote Sir Josiah
Child in 1688, were to be found upon the Exchange of London, worth ten
thousand pounds than thirty years before there were worth one thousand.
He adds, there were one hundred coaches kept now for one formerly; and
remarks, that a serge gown, once worn by a gentlewoman, was now
discarded by a chambermaid.  The manufactures of the country were
greatly increased and wonderfully improved by the arrival of multitudes
of French artisans in 1685, on the revocation of the edict of Nantes.
"An entire suburb of London," says Voltaire, in his _Siècle de Louis
XIV._, "was peopled with French manufacturers of silk; others carried
thither the art of making crystal in perfection, which has been since
this epoch lost in France."  Spitalfields is the suburb alluded to;
thousands besides were located in Soho and St. Giles's.  "London,"
observes Chamberlayne, in 1692, "is a large magazine of men, money,
ships, horses, and ammunition; of all sorts of commodities, necessary
or expedient for the use or pleasure of mankind.  It is the mighty
rendezvous of nobility, gentry, courtiers, divines, lawyers,
physicians, merchants, seamen, and all kinds of excellent artificers of
the most refined arts, and most excellent beauties; for it is observed,
that in most families of England, if there be any son or daughter that
excels the rest in beauty or wit, or perhaps courage or industry, or
any other rare quality, London is their north star, and they are never
at rest till they point directly thither."



[1] He mentions his preaching once at St. Dunstan's church, when an
accident occurred, which alarmed the vast concourse, and was likely to
have occasioned much mischief.  He relates the odd circumstance of an
old woman, squeezed in the crowd, asking forgiveness of God at the
church door, and promising, if he would deliver her that time she would
never come to the place again.




CHAPTER VI.

LONDON DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

From Maitland, who published his History of London in 1739, we learn
that there were at that time, within the bills of mortality, 5,099
streets, 95,968 houses, 207 inns, 447 taverns, and 551 coffee-houses.
In 1681, the bills included 132 parishes; 147 are found in those for
the year 1744.  Judging from the bills of mortality, which however
cannot be trusted as accurate, population considerably increased in
that portion of the century included in Maitland's history.  During the
seventeen years from 1703 to 1721, the total number of burials was
393,034.  During the next seventeen years, to 1738, they amounted to
457,779.  The extension of London was still towards the west.  In the
Weekly Journal of 1717 it is stated, the new buildings between
Bond-street and Marylebone go on with all possible diligence, and the
houses even let and sell before they are built.  In 1723, the duke of
Grafton and the earl of Grantham purchased the waste ground at the
upper end of Albemarle and Dover-streets for gardens, and turned a road
leading into May Fair another way.  (London, vol. i, p. 310.)
Devonshire House remained for some time the boundary of the buildings
in Piccadilly, though farther on, by the Hyde Park Corner, there were
several habitations.  Lanesborough House stood there by the top of
Constitution-hill, and was, in 1773, converted into an infirmary, since
rebuilt, and now known as St. George's Hospital.  It may be added, that
Westminster Hospital, the first institution of the kind supported by
voluntary contributions, was founded in 1719.  Several churches were
erected in the early part of the eighteenth century.  In the year 1711,
an act was passed for the erection of no less than fifty, but only ten
had been built on new foundations when Maitland published his work.
These ecclesiastical edifices exhibit the architectural taste of the
age.  The finest specimen of the period is the church of St.
Martin-in-the-fields, built by Gibbs.  It was commenced in 1721, and
finished in 1726, at a cost of nearly £37,000.  In spite of the
drawback in the ill-placed steeple over the portico, without any
basement tower, the building strikes the beholder with an emotion of
delight.  St. George's, Hanover-square, and St. George's, Bloomsbury,
(the latter exhibiting a remarkable campanile,) were also built about
the same time, the one in 1724, the other in 1731.  Almost all the
churches built after the fire are in the modern style, imported from
Italy.  In its colonnades, porticoes, architraves, and columns, this
style presents elements of the Greek school of design, but differently
arranged, more complicated in composition, more florid and ambitious in
detail.  Taste must assign the palm of superiority to the Grecian
temple, with its severe beauty and chastened sublimity.  The one style
indicates the era of original genius, and exhibits the fruits of
masterminds in that line of invention, while the other marks an epoch
of mere imitation, supplying only the degenerate produce of
transplanted taste.

Feeble attempts were made to improve the state of the streets, but they
remained pretty much in their former condition till the Paving Act of
1762.  Stalls, sheds, and sign-posts obstructed the path, and the
pavement was left to the inhabitants, to be made "in such a manner, and
with such materials, as pride, poverty, or caprice might suggest.  Curb
stones were unknown, and the footway was exposed to the carriage-way,
except in some of the principal streets, where a line of posts and
chains, or wooden paling, afforded occasional protection.  It was a
matter of moment to go near the wall; and Gay, in his Trivia, supplies
directions to whom to yield it, and to whom to refuse it."--_Handbook_,
by Cunninghame, xxxi.  "In the last age," says Johnson, "when my mother
lived in London, there were two sets of people--those who gave the wall
and those who took it, the peaceable and the quarrelsome.  Now it is
fixed that every man keeps to the right; and if one is taking the wall
another yields it, and it is never a dispute."  The lighting, drainage,
and police, were all in a wretched condition.

To attempt to give anything like a detailed chronological account of
events in London during the first half of the eighteenth century, is
neither possible nor desirable in a work like this.  Indeed, the far
greater part of the incidents recorded in the city chronicles relates
to royal visits, city feasts, celebration of victories, local tumults,
and remarkable storms and frosts.  All that can be done, or expected,
in this small volume, is to fix upon a few leading and important scenes
and events, illustrative of the times.

In the reign of queen Anne, the chief matter of interest in connection
with London was the political excitement which prevailed.  It turned
upon questions relating to the Church and the toleration of dissenters.
Dean Swift, in a letter dated London, December, 1703, tells a friend,
that the occasional Conformity Bill, intended to nullify the Toleration
Act, was then the subject of everybody's conversation.  "It was so
universal," observes the witty dean, "that I observed the dogs in the
street much more contumelious and quarrelsome than usual; and the very
night before the bill went up, a committee of Whig and Tory cats had a
very warm debate upon the roof of our house."  Defoe, the well-known
author of Robinson Crusoe, and a London citizen, rendered himself very
conspicuous by his advocacy of the rights of conscience; and in
consequence of writing an ironical work, which then created great
excitement, entitled, "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters," he was
doomed to stand three successive days in the pillory, at the Royal
Exchange by the Cheapside Conduit, and near Temple Bar.  Immense crowds
gathered to gaze on the sufferer; but "the people, who were expected to
treat him ill, on the contrary pitied him, and wished those who set him
there were placed in his room, and expressed their affections by loud
shouts and acclamations when he was taken down."--_Life of Defoe_, by
Chalmers, p. 28.

The political excitement of London reached its height during the trial
of Dr. Sacheverell.  He had preached two sermons, one of which was
delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral, on the 5th of November, 1709, in
which he inculcated the doctrine of passive obedience and
non-resistance, and inveighed with great bitterness against all
nonconformists.  The drift of his sermon was to undermine the
principles of the Revolution, though he professed to approve of that
event, pretending to consider it as by no means a case of resistance to
the supreme power.  The ministry, considering that his doctrine struck
a fatal blow at the constitution, as established in 1688, prosecuted
him accordingly.  With Sacheverell numbers of the clergy sympathized,
especially Atterbury, the leader of his party.  It was supposed that
the queen was not unfriendly to the arraigned divine.  He was escorted
to Westminster Hall, the place of his trial, by immense crowds of
people, who rent the air with their huzzas.  The queen herself attended
at the proceedings, and was hailed with deafening shouts, as she
stepped from her carriage, "God bless your majesty; we hope your
majesty is for Dr. Sacheverell."  The spacious building in which he was
tried, the scene of so many state trials, was fitted up for the
occasion, benches and galleries being provided for peers and commoners,
peeresses and gentlewomen, who crowded every seat; the lower classes
squeezing themselves to suffocation into the part of the old building
allotted to their use.  The London rabble were so much excited by what
took place, or were so completely swayed by more influential
malcontents, that on the evening of the second day of the trial they
attacked a meeting-house in New-Court, tearing away doors and
casements, pews and pulpit, and proceeding with the spoil to
Lincoln's-inn-fields.  In the open space--where was then no fair garden
inclosed with palisades, it being a rendezvous for mountebanks, dancing
bears, and baited bulls--the populace kindled a bonfire, and consumed
the ruins of the conventicle.  They went forth in quest of the
minister, Mr. Burgess, in order to burn him and his pulpit together.
Happily disappointed of their victim, they wreaked their vengeance upon
six other dissenting places of worship.  An episcopal church in
Clerkenwell shared the same fate, being mistaken for one of the hated
structures through want of a steeple; for steeple and no steeple
probably constituted the only difference in religion appreciable by
these infatuated mortals.  The advocates of toleration, even though
they might be good Churchmen, as Bishop Burnet for example, were also
in danger.  Indeed, the tumult became of such grave importance, that
queen and magistrates, court and city, felt it a duty to combine in
order to quell the disgraceful outbreak.  A few sword cuts, and the
capture of several prisoners, put down the insurrection; but
ecclesiastical politics still ran high in London, and whigs and
dissenters were in low estimation in many quarters, till the Hanoverian
succession brightened the prospects of the liberal party.  While Queen
Anne lay ill, deep anxiety pervaded the political circles in London.
It is not generally known, but it is stated on the authority of
tradition, that the first place in which the decease of Anne was
publicly announced, and the accession of George I. proclaimed, was the
very meeting-house in New Court which had been formerly attacked by the
mob.  The day on which the queen died was a Sunday; and as Bishop
Burnet was riding in his coach through Smithfield, he met Mr. Bradbury,
then the minister of the chapel, and told him that immediately upon the
royal demise, then momentarily expected, he would send a messenger to
give tidings of the event.  Before the morning service was over a man
appeared in the gallery, and dropped a handkerchief, being the
preconcerted signal; whereupon the preacher, in his last prayer,
alluded to the removal of her majesty, and implored a blessing on King
George and the house of Hanover.

The most striking feature in the history of London in the reign of
George I., was the extraordinary spirit of speculation which then
existed.  The moderate gains of trade and commerce did not satisfy the
cupidity of the human breast, which then, as it has done since, burst
out into a fever, that consumed all reason, prudence, and principle.
Men made haste to be rich, and consequently fell into temptation and a
snare.  In 1717, an unprecedented excitement pervaded the money market.
Every one familiar with the city knows the plain-looking edifice of
brick and stone which stands in Threadneedle-street, not far from the
Flower-pot, and which is so well described by one whose youth was
passed within it, as "deserted or thinly peopled, with few or no traces
of comers-in or goers-out, like what Ossian describes, when he says, I
passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate."  That
grave-looking edifice, now like some respectable citizen retired from
business, was at one time the busiest place in the world.  A scheme was
planned and formed for making fortunes by the South Sea trade.  A
company was incorporated by government for the purpose, and the house
in Threadneedle-street was the scene of business.  Stock rapidly
doubled in value, and went on till it reached a premium of nine hundred
per cent.  People of all ranks flocked to Change-alley, and crowded the
courts in riotous eagerness to purchase shares.  The nobleman drove
from the West-end, the squire came up from the country, ladies of
fashion, and people of no fashion, swarmed round the new El Dorado, to
dig up the sparkling treasure.  Swift compares these crowds of human
beings to the waters of the South Sea Gulf, from which their
imagination was drawing such abundant draughts of wealth.

  "Subscribers here by thousands float,
    And jostle one another down,
  Each paddling in her leaky boat,
    And here they fish for gold, and drown.
  Now buried in the depths below,
    Now mounted up to heaven again;
  They reel and stagger to and fro,
    At their wits' end like drunken men."


The mania spread so that the South Sea scheme itself could not satisfy
the lust for money.  Maitland enumerates one hundred and fifty-six
companies formed at this time.  Among some which look feasible, there
were the following characterized by extravagant absurdities:--An
association for discovering gold mines, for bleaching hair, for making
flying engines, for feeding hogs, for erecting salt-pans in Holy
Island, for making butter from beech trees, for making deal boards out
of saw-dust, for extracting silver from lead, and finally, (which seems
to have been much needed to exhaust the maddening vapors that had made
their way into it,) for manufacturing an air pump for the brain.

Some of them were surely mere satires on the rest; yet Maitland says,
after giving his long list, "Besides these bubbles, there were
innumerable more that perished in embryo; however, the sums intended to
be raised by the above airy projects amounted to about three hundred
million pounds.  Yet the lowest of the shares in any of them advanced
above cent. per cent., most above four hundred per cent., and some to
twenty times the price of subscription."  The bulk of these speculators
must clearly have been bereft of their senses, and the madness was too
violent to last long.  The evil worked its own cure.  The golden bubble
was blown larger, and larger, till it burst.  Then came indescribable
misery.  Thousands were ruined.  Revenge against the inventors now took
the place of cupidity, and indignation aroused those who had looked
patiently on during the rage of the _money_ mania.  One nobleman in
parliament proposed that the contrivers of the South Sea scheme should,
after the manner of the Roman parricide, be sown up alive in sacks, and
flung into the Thames.  A more moderate punishment was inflicted in the
confiscation of all the estates belonging to the directors of the
company, amounting to above two millions, which sum was divided among
the sufferers.  The railway speculation in our own time was a display
of avarice of the same order; and all such indulgence in the inordinate
lust of gain is sure to be overtaken, in the end, by its righteous
penalty.  The laws of Divine providence provide for the punishment of
those who thus, under the influence of an impetuous selfishness, grasp
at immoderate possessions.  Covetousness overreaches itself in such
cases, and misses its mark.  How many instances have occurred in the
present day illustrative of that wise saying in Holy Scripture: "As the
partridge sitteth on eggs and hatcheth them not, so he that getteth
riches and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and
at the end shall be a fool!"  The solemn lessons thus suggested should
be practically studied by the man of business, and while he is taught
to moderate his desires after the things of this world, he is also
instructed to turn the main current of his thoughts and feelings into a
far different channel, to seek durable riches and righteousness--bags
which wax not old--treasures which thieves cannot break through and
steal; and to "so pass through things temporal, as not to lose the
things which are eternal."

The history of London in the reign of George II. is remarkable for the
excitement which was produced by the northern rebellion, and for a far
different excitement, which we shall presently notice with great
delight.  The progress of the arms of Prince Edward, the pretender, in
the year 1745, created much alarm in all parts of the country,
especially in London, the seat of government.  When the invading army
was found to have proceeded as far as Derby, it was generally expected
it would advance to the metropolis.  The loyalty of the citizens was
called forth by the impending peril, and all classes hastened to
express their attachment to the sovereign, and their readiness to
support the house of Hanover in this great emergency.  The corporation,
the clergy, and the dissenting ministers, presented dutiful addresses.
Several corps of volunteers were raised, large sums of money were
contributed, and even the peace-loving body of Friends came forward to
furnish the troops with woolen waistcoats to be worn under their
clothing.  As the cause of Popery was identified with that of the
pretender, the Papists in London were regarded with great apprehension.
A proclamation was issued for putting the laws in force against them
and all non-jurors.  Romanists and reputed Romanists were required to
remove out of the city, to at least ten miles off.  All Jesuits and
priests who, after a certain time, should be found within that distance
were to be brought to trial.  The pretender was defeated at Culloden,
and the news took off a heavy burden of fear from the minds of the
London citizens.  Many prisoners were brought to the metropolis, and
among them the Earl of Kilmarnock, Lord Balmerino, and Lord Lovat, who
were all executed for treason on Tower-hill.  The beheading of the last
of these brought to a close the long series of sanguinary spectacles of
that nature, which had gathered from time to time such a vast concourse
of citizens, on the hill by the Tower gates.

The other kind of excitement in London, hinted at above, relates to the
most important of all subjects.  Spiritual religion had been at a low
ebb for a considerable period among the different denominations of
Christians.  A cold formalism was but too common.  It is not, however,
to be inferred that men of sound and earnest piety did not exist, both
among Churchmen and dissenters.  One beautiful specimen of religious
fervor and consistency may be mentioned in connection with the earlier
part of this century.  Sir Thomas Abney, who filled the office of lord
mayor in 1701, and also represented the city in parliament, is
described as having been an eminent blessing to his country and the
Church of God.  He died in 1722, deeply regretted, not only by his
religious friends, but by his fellow-citizens in general.  We have seen
or heard it stated respecting him, that during his mayoralty he
habitually maintained family worship, without suffering it to be
interrupted by any parties or banquets.  On such occasions prayer was
introduced, or he retired to present it in the bosom of his family.
Many other beautiful instances of a devout spirit, of faith in Christ,
and of love to God, were, no doubt, open at that time to the eye of Him
who seeth in secret; but neither then, nor for some time afterwards,
were any vigorous efforts made to bring religion home with power to the
mass of the London population.  That distinguished man, the Rev. George
Whitefield, was an instrument in the hand of God of effecting in the
metropolis, before the close of the first half of the century, an
unprecedented religious awakening.  He came up to officiate in the
Tower in 1737, but his first sermon in London was delivered in
Bishopsgate church.  On his second visit, crowds climbed the leads, and
hung on the rails of the buildings in which he was engaged to minister,
while multitudes went away because not able to get anywhere within the
sound of his voice.  Nothing had been seen like it since the days of
such men as Baxter and Vincent.  When collections were needed,
Whitefield was eagerly sought, as the man capable above all others of
replenishing the exhausted coffers of Christian beneficence.  The
people sat or stood densely wedged together, with eyes riveted on the
speaker, and many a tear rolled down the cheeks of citizen and
apprentice, matron and maiden, as the instructions and appeals of that
wonderful preacher, expressed in stirring words and phrases, fell upon
their ears, in tones marvelously rich, varied, and musical.  With an
eloquence, which now flashed and rolled like the elements in a
thunder-storm, and then tenderly beamed forth like the sun-ray on the
flower whose head the storm had drenched and made to droop, did he
enforce on the people truths which he had gathered out of God's
precious word, and the power of which he had evidently himself realized
in all the divinity of their origin, the sublimity of their import, the
directness of their application, and the unutterable solemnity of their
results.  As a man dwelling amidst eternal things, with heaven and hell
before him, the eye of God upon him, and immortal souls around him,
hastening to their account,--in short, as every minister of Christ's
holy gospel ought to deliver his message, did he do so.  The holiness
of God, as a Being of purer eyes than to behold iniquity; the perfect
excellence of the Divine law; its demand of entire obedience; its
adaptation, if observed, to promote the happiness of man; its
spirituality, reaching to the most secret thoughts and affections of
the heart; the corruption of human nature; the alienation of man from
God, and his moral inability to keep the Divine law; the sentence of
everlasting condemnation, which, as the awful, but righteous
consequence, falls upon our race; the marvelous kindness of God in so
commending his love to us, "that while we were yet sinners Christ died
for us;" the Saviour's fulfillment of the law in his gracious
representative character; the perfect satisfaction for sin rendered by
his atoning sacrifice; the unutterable condescension and infinite love
with which he receiveth sinners; the grace of the Holy Spirit; the
necessity of an entire regeneration of the soul by his Divine agency;
the full and free invitations of the gospel to mankind at large;
forgiveness through the blood of Christ offered to all who believe; the
universal obligation of repentance; the requirement of holiness of
heart and life, as the evidence of love to Christ, and the indwelling
of the Spirit, as the Author of holiness; such were the grand truths
which formed the theme of Whitefield's discourses, and which, in
numerous instances, fell with startling power on ears unaccustomed to
evangelical statements and appeals.  The preacher was a man of prayer
as well as eloquence, and in his London visits poured out his heart in
earnest supplication to God for the effusion of his Holy Spirit upon
the vast masses of unconverted souls, slumbering around him in the arms
of spiritual death.  Whitefield could not confine himself to churches,
and his out-door preaching soon increased the interest which his former
services had produced.  "I do not know," said the celebrated Countess
of Hertford, in one of her letters, "whether you have heard of our new
sect, who call themselves Methodists.  There is one Whitefield at the
head of them, a young man of about five-and-twenty, who has for some
months gone about preaching in the fields and market-places of the
country, and in London at May Fair and Moorfields to ten or twelve
thousand people at a time."  Larger multitudes still are said to have
been sometimes convened; on Kennington Common, for example, the number
of Whitefield's congregation has been computed at sixty thousand.

The notice taken of the young preacher by this lady of fashion, is only
a specimen of the interest felt in his proceedings by many persons in
the same rank of life.  The nobility attended in the drawing-room of
the Countess of Huntingdon to listen to his sermons, or accompanied her
to the churches where he had engaged to officiate.  Long lists of these
titled names have been preserved, in which some of the unlikeliest
occur, such as Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, the Earl of Chesterfield,
Lord Bolingbroke, Bubb Doddington, and George Selwyn.  Indeed, it seems
to have been quite the fashion for the great ones of the land to
cluster round this man of God.  He was the theme of their conversation.
By all he was marveled at; by some he was censured or ridiculed; by
more he was praised and caressed; by a few he was honored and blessed
as the means of their spiritual renewal or edification.  Among the
middle and lower classes in London, as elsewhere, did he reap his
richest harvests.  How many hundreds and thousands were melted down
under the power of the word which he proclaimed!  How many of that
generation in our old city are now before the throne of the Lamb,
adoring the gracious Providence which brought them within the sound of
Whitefield's voice!

A remarkable occurrence in London, in the year 1750, gave occasion for
a singular display of this great preacher's holy zeal.  Shocks of an
earthquake were felt in different parts of London and the vicinity,
especially in the neighborhood of the river Thames.  Such visitations
are sure to produce violent terror, and on this occasion the feeling
reached its highest pitch.  The people, apprehending there was greater
danger in their own houses, and in the streets lined with buildings,
than in wide spaces open and unencumbered, rushed, in immense crowds,
to Hyde Park, and there waited, in fearful foreboding of the judgments
of the Almighty.  One night, when the excitement was overwhelming, and
a dense multitude had congregated there under the dark arch of heaven,
Whitefield, regarding it as a signal opportunity for preaching the
gospel to his fellow-countrymen, hastened to the spot, and delivered
one of his most powerful and pathetic discourses.  He called the
attention of the throngs before him to the coming advent of the Son of
God, to judge the world in righteousness, when not the inhabitants of
one city only, but all of Adam's race, in every clime, would be
gathered together, to receive from the lips of Eternal Justice their
final and unalterable sentence.  Nor did he fail to point out the
character of Christ in his relation to man as a Saviour as well as
Judge, urging his hearers to flee from the wrath to come, and to lay
hold on the hope set before them in the gospel.  "The awful manner in
which he addressed the careless, Christless sinner, the sublimity of
the discourse, and the appearance of the place, added to the gloom of
night, continued to impress the mind with seriousness, and to render
the event solemn and memorable in the highest degree."  While the
shades of night rendered him invisible to his audience, his clear
voice--which could be heard distinctly at the distance of a mile,
passing through a marvelous variety of intonations, in which the very
soul of the speaker seemed to burst out in gushes of terror or
love--must, as it sounded over the park, and fell upon the eager
listening thousands, have seemed to them like the utterance of some
impalpable and unseen spirit, who, with unearthly powers of address,
had come down from heaven to warn and invite.  "God," he observed, in
writing to Lady Huntingdon, "has been terribly shaking the metropolis;
I hope it is an earnest of his giving a shock to secure sinners, and
making them to cry out, 'What shall we do to be saved?'  What can shake
a soul whose hopes of happiness in time and in eternity are built upon
the Rock of ages?  Winds may blow, rains may and will descend even upon
persons of the most exalted stations, but they that trust in the Lord
Jesus Christ never shall, never can be totally confounded."  Charles
Wesley was in town during this dispensation of Providence, (which
happily passed off without inflicting any serious injury,) and he also
employed himself in faithful and earnest preaching.  So did Mr.
Romaine, whose ministry will be noticed more particularly in the next
chapter.  The only additional information we can give respecting this
religious revival, is that the Rev. John Wesley, equally distinguished
with Whitefield, but by gifts of a different order, began his course in
London as the founder of the Methodist Connection, in 1740, and spent
among the London citizens a large portion of his apostolic and
self-denying labors, with unconquerable perseverance and eminent
success.  He was accustomed, at the commencement of his career, to meet
with the Moravians for religious exercises in their chapel in
Fetter-lane; thus associating that edifice, which still remains, with
the early history of Methodism.  "There the great leaders in this
glorious warfare, with their zealous coadjutors--persons whose whole
souls were consecrated to the cause of God our Saviour--often took
sweet counsel together.  They have all long since gone to their rest,
to meet in a better temple together, as they have often worshiped in
the temple below, and to go out no more."

In further illustration of the state of London at the time now under
our review, we will turn to consider some other of its social aspects.
Literary society presents some curious and amusing facts.  The
booksellers before the fire were located, for the most part, in St.
Paul's Church-yard.  It is stated that not less than £150,000 worth of
books were consumed during that conflagration.  The calamity proved the
ruin of many, and was the occasion of raising very enormously the price
of old books.  Little Britain, near Duck-lane, became the rendezvous of
the trade, which remained there for some years afterwards.  "It was,"
says Roger North, "a plentiful and perpetual emporium of learned
authors."  The shops were spacious, and the literati of the day gladly
resorted thither, where they seldom failed to find agreeable
conversation.  The booksellers themselves were intelligent persons,
with whom, for the sake of their bookish knowledge, the most brilliant
wits were pleased to converse.  Before 1750, the literary emporium of
London was transferred to Paternoster-row.  Up to that time the
activity in the publishing business was very great, especially in the
pamphlet line; perhaps there were more publishers then than even now.
Dunton, a famous member of the fraternity, wrote his own life, in which
he enumerates a long list of his brethren, with particulars relating to
their character and history.  The authors of London were computed by
Swift to amount in number to some thousands.  While a Swift, a Pope, an
Addison, a Steele, a Bolingbroke, a Johnson, and other world-known
names in that Augustan age of letters, produced works of original
genius, the bulk of the writers who supplied the trade were "mere
drudges of the pen--manufacturers of literature."  A whole herd of
these were dealers in ghosts, murders, and other marvels, published in
periodical pamphlets, upon every half sheet of which the tax of a
halfpenny was laid on in the reign of Queen Anne.  "Have you seen the
red stamp the papers are marked with?" asks Dean Swift, in a letter to
Mr. Dingley--"methinks the stamping is worth a half-penny."  These
panderers to a vitiated taste, which is far from having disappeared in
our own day, and other writers of the humbler class, were so numerous
in Grub-street, that the name became the cognomen for the humblest
brethren of the book craft.  There and elsewhere did they pour forth
their lucubrations in lofty attics, which led Johnson to make the
pompous remark, "that the professors of literature generally reside in
the highest stories.  The wisdom of the ancients was well acquainted
with the intellectual advantages of an elevated situation; why else
were the muses stationed on Olympus or Parnassus, by those who could,
with equal right, have raised them bowers in the vale of Tempe, or
erected their altars among the flexures of Meander?"  The favorite
places of resort for poets, wits, and authors, were the coffee-houses,
especially Wills', in Russell-street, Convent Garden, where Dryden had
long occupied the critics' throne, and swayed the sceptre over the
kingdom of letters.  Thither went the aspirant after fame, to obtain
subscribers for his forthcoming publication, or to secure the approving
nod of some literary Jupiter; and there many an offspring of the muse
was strangled in the birth, or if suffered to live, treated with
merciless severity.  In the same street lived Davies, the bookseller,
at whose house Boswell, the biographer of Johnson, became acquainted
with his hero.  "The very place," he says, "where I was fortunate
enough to be introduced to the illustrious subject of this work,
deserves to be particularly marked.  It was No. 8.  I never pass by
without feeling reverence and regret."

Pope was the most successful author of his time, and realized £5,320 by
his Iliad.  The keenness of his satire in the Dunciad threw literary
London into convulsions.  On the day the book was first vended, a crowd
of authors besieged the shop, threatening to prosecute the publisher,
while hawkers crushed in to buy it up, with the hope of reaping a good
harvest from the retailing of so caustic an article.  The dunces held
weekly meetings to project hostilities against the satirical critic,
whose keen weapon had cut them to the quick.  One wrote to the prime
minister to inform him that Mr. Pope was an enemy to the government;
another bought his image in clay to execute him in effigy.  A
surreptitious edition was published, with an owl in the frontispiece,
the genuine one exhibiting an ass laden with authors.  Hence arose a
contest among the booksellers, some recommending the edition of the
owl, and others the edition of the ass, by which names the two used to
be distinguished.  In 1737, Dr. Johnson came up to the metropolis with
two-pence halfpenny in his pocket--David Garrick, his companion, having
one halfpenny more.  Toiling in the service of Cave, and writing for
the Gentleman's Magazine, then a few years old, the former could but
obtain a bare subsistence, which forced from him the well-known lines
in his poem on London:--

  "This mournful truth is everywhere confessed,
  Slow rises worth by poverty depressed."

He lodged at a stay-maker's, in Exeter-street, and dined at the Pine
Apple, just by, for eight-pence.  An odd example of the intercourse
between bookmakers and bookvenders, is preserved in the anecdote of
Johnson beating Osborne, his publisher, for alleged impertinence.  Of
the genial habits of literary men in London, we have an illustration in
the clubs which he formed, or to which he belonged.  That which still
continues to hold its meetings at the Thatched House, is the
continuation of the famous one established at a later period than is
embraced in this chapter, at the Turk's Head, where Johnson used to
meet Reynolds, Burke, and Goldsmith.

But it is time to glance at fashionable London.  As to its locality, it
has been anything but stationary.  Gradually, however, it has been
gliding westward for the last three centuries and more.  First breaking
its way through Ludgate, and lining the Thames side of the Strand with
noble houses, then pushing its course farther on, and spreading itself
out over the favored parishes of St. James and St. George.  Here,
during the first half of the last century, might be seen the increasing
centralization of English patricians.  The city was deserted of
aristocratic inhabitants, and Devonshire-square was the spot "on which
lingered the last lady of rank who clung to her ancestral abode."  But
this westward tendency, flowing wave on wave, was checked for awhile in
Soho and Leicester-squares, which remained till within less than a
hundred years ago, the abode or resort of the sons and daughters of
fashion.  St. James's, Grosvenor, and Hanover-squares, were, however,
of a more select and magnificent character.  The titled in Church and
state loved to reside in the elegant mansions which lined and adorned
them, so convenient for visits to court, which then migrated backwards
and forwards between St. James's and Kensington.  Still, though these
anti-plebeian regions were scenes of increasing convenience, comfort,
and luxury, some of the nuisances of former days lingered amidst them;
and as late as 1760, a great many hogs were seized by the overseers of
St. George's, Hanover-square, because they were bred, or kept in the
immediate neighborhood of these wealthy abodes.

On the levee day of a prime minister, a couple of streets were
sometimes lined with the coaches of political adherents, seeking power
or place, when favored visitors were admitted to an audience in his
bedchamber.  The royal levees were thronged with multitudes of
courtiers, who thereby accomplished the double purpose of paying their
respect to the sovereign and reviving their friendships with each
other.  It is very melancholy to read in dean Swift's letters such a
passage as the following, since it evinces so painful a disregard of
the religious character and privileges of the Lord's-day, very common,
it is feared, at the time to which it relates: "Did I never tell you,"
he says, "that I go to court on Sundays, as to a coffee-house, to see
acquaintances whom I should not otherwise see twice a year."

"Drawing-rooms were first introduced in the reign of George II., and
during the lifetime of the queen were held every evening, when the
royal family played at cards, and all persons properly dressed were
admitted.  After the demise of the queen in 1737, they were held but
twice a week, and in a few years were wholly discontinued, the king
holding his 'state' in the morning twice a week."--_Cunninghame_.

Promenading in Pall Mall and the parks on foot was a favorite
recreation of the lords and ladies of the first two Georges' reigns, at
which they might be seen in court dresses, the former with bag wig and
sword, the latter with hooped petticoats and high-heeled shoes,
sweeping the gravel with their trains, and looking with immense
contempt on the citizens east of Temple-bar who dared to invade the
magic circle which fashion had drawn around itself.  These gathering
places for the gay were often infested by persons who committed
outrages, to us almost incredible.  Emulous of the name, as of the
deeds of the savage, they took the title of Mohawks, the appellation of
a well-known tribe of Indians.  Their sport was, sword in hand, to
attack and wound the quiet wayfarer.  On one occasion, we find from
Swift's letters, that he was terribly frightened by these inhuman
wretches.  Even women did not escape their violence.  "I walked in the
park this evening," says Swift, under date of March 9th, 1713, "and
came home early to avoid the Mohawks."  Again, on the 16th, "Lord
Winchelsea told me to-day at court, that two of the Mohawks caught a
maid of old lady Winchelsea's at the door of their house in the park
with a candle, who had just lighted out somebody.  They cut all her
face, and beat her without any provocation."

Another glimpse of the London of that day, which we catch while turning
over its records, presents a further unfavorable illustration of the
state of society, both in high and in low life.  In May Fair there
stood a chapel, where a certain Dr. Keith, of infamous notoriety,
performed the marriage service for couples who sought a clandestine
union; and while the rich availed themselves of this provision, persons
in humbler life found a similar place open to them in the Fleet prison.
Parliament put down these enormities in 1753.

Ranelagh and Vauxhall were places of frivolous amusement resorted to
even by the higher classes.  From these and other haunts of folly,
lumbering coaches or sedan chairs conveyed home the ladies through the
dimly lighted or pitch dark streets, and the gentlemen picked their way
over the ruggedly paved thoroughfares, glad of the proffered aid of the
link boys, who crowded round the gates of such places of public
entertainment or resort as were open at night, and who, arrived at the
door to which they had escorted some fashionable foot passenger,
quenched the blazing torch in the trumpet-looking ornament, which one
now and then still sees lingering over the entrance to some house in an
antiquated square or court, a characteristic relic of London in the
olden time.  A walk along some of the more quiet and retired streets at
the west end of the metropolis, which were scenes of fashion and gayety
a hundred years ago, awaken in the mind, when it is in certain moods,
trains of solemn and healthful reflection.  We think of the generations
that once, with light or heavy hearts, passed and repassed along those
ways, too many of them, we fear, however burdened with earthly
solicitudes, sadly heedless of the high interests of the everlasting
future.  Led away by the splendid attractions of this world, its
wealth, power, praise, or pleasure, they too surely found at last that
what they followed so eagerly, and thought so delightful, was only a
delusion, like the gorgeous mirage of the desert.  Some few years
hence, and we shall have ourselves gone the way of all the earth.
Other feet will tread the pavement, and other eyes drink in the light,
and look upon the works and ways of fellow-mortals; and other minds
will call up recollections of the past, and moralize with sombre hues
of feeling as we do now; and where then will the reader be?  It is no
impertinent suggestion in a work like this, that he should make that
grave inquiry--nor pause till, in the light which illumines the world
to come, he has duly considered all the materials he possesses for
supplying a probable answer.




CHAPTER VII.

LONDON DURING THE LATTER HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

"In the latter half of the century few public buildings were erected,
yet among them were two of the noblest which the city even now
possesses, namely, the Excise Office and Newgate.  The end of the last
century was, however, marked by the erection of the East India House,
more decidedly Grecian than anything else which preceded it.  Compared
with what it has since been, architecture then was rather at a low ebb,
for although one or two of the buildings above mentioned are noble
works, they must be taken as exceptions to the meagre, insipid, and
monotonous style which stamps this period, and which such erections as
the Adelphi and Portland-place rather confirm than contradict.  With
the exception of St. Peter-le-poor, 1791, and St. Martin Outwich, 1796,
not one church was built from the commencement of the reign of George
III., till the regency."--_Penny Cyclopædia, art. London_.  This remark
applies to the city.  Paddington church was built during that period,
and opened in 1791.  The chief public buildings of the period, besides
those noticed, are the Mansion House, finished in 1753; Middlesex
Hospital, built 1756; Magdalen Hospital, 1769; Freemasons' Hall, 1775;
Somerset House, in its present state, 1775; and Trinity House, 1793.
Westminster bridge was finished in 1750, and Blackfriars begun ten
years afterwards; these, with London bridge, were the only roadways
over the Thames during the eighteenth century.

The extremities of London continued to extend.  Grosvenor-place, Hyde
Park Corner, was reared 1767; Marylebone-garden was leased out to
builders 1778; Somers-town was commenced 1786.  "Though London
increases every day," observes Horace Walpole in 1791, "and Mr.
Herschel has just discovered a new square or circus, somewhere by the
New-road, in the _via lactea_, where the cows used to feed; I believe
you will think the town cannot hold all its inhabitants, so
prodigiously the population is augmented."  "There will be one street
from London to Brentford, ay, and from London to every village ten
miles round; lord Camden has just let ground at Kentish-town for
building 1,400 houses; nor do I wonder; London is, I am certain, much
fuller than ever I saw it.  I have twice this spring been going to stop
my coach in Piccadilly, to inquire what was the matter, thinking there
was a mob; not at all, it was only passengers."

The Westminster Paving Act, passed in 1762, was the commencement of a
new system of improvement in the great thoroughfares.  The old signs,
posts, water-spouts, and similar nuisances and obstructions, were
removed, and a pavement laid down for foot passengers.

But until the introduction of gas, in the present century, the streets
continued to be dimly lighted, and the services of the link boy at
night to be in general requisition.  In 1760, names began to be placed
on people's doors, and four years subsequently, the plan of numbering
houses originated.  Burlington-street was the first place in which this
convenient arrangement was made.  In Lincoln's-inn-fields it was next
followed.

The history of London, during the latter half of the eighteenth
century, was emphatically that of an age of public excitements, some of
them specially pertaining to the city, while in others the whole
country shared.  The removal of Mr. Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham,
from the high ministerial position he had occupied--an event which
occurred in 1757--produced very strong ebullitions of feeling in the
hearts of his numerous admirers.  London largely participated in the
popular admiration of that extraordinary man, and expressed a sense of
his services by voting him the freedom of the city, which was presented
to him in an elegant gold box.  The success of the British arms during
the next year, in the taking of Louisbourg, led to great rejoicings,
illuminations, and the presentation to the king of loyal congratulatory
addresses.  In the year following, the wants of the army being found
very urgent, and men being unwilling to enlist, a subscription was
opened at Guildhall to meet the exigency by raising a fund, out of
which the amount of premium on enlistment might be augmented.  The
taking of Quebec, in 1759, again awakened enthusiastic joy; and the
record of bonfires, ringing of bells, and kindred demonstrations, are
conspicuous in the civic annals for that year.  The accession of George
III., in 1760, was marked by the full payment to the young sovereign of
all those loyal dues, which are tendered by the metropolitan
authorities and community when such an important event occurs as the
transfer of the sceptre into new hands.  But the public excitement in
his favor was soon exchanged for feelings equally intense of an
opposite character.  John Wilkes appeared on the stage of public life
in 1754--a man utterly destitute of virtue and principle, but possessed
of certain qualities likely to render him popular, especially an
abundance of humor, and a wonderful degree of assurance.  By attacking
Lord Bute, the favorite of the king, but no favorite with the people,
he gained applause, and was set down as a patriot.  In No. 45 of the
"North Briton," a newspaper which he edited, a violent attack on his
majesty appeared; indeed, it went so far as to charge him with the
utterance of a falsehood in his speech from the throne.  The house of
Wilkes was searched, and his person seized for this political offence;
but sheltering himself under his parliamentary privileges, he obtained
his dismissal from custody.  Upon an information being filed against
him by the attorney-general, he declined to appear, when the House of
Commons took the matter in hand, and declared Wilkes's paper to be a
false, seditious, and scandalous libel, and ordered it to be burned by
the common hangman.  The sympathies of many in London being with
Wilkes, a riot ensued upon the attempt which the sheriffs made to
execute the parliamentary sentence.  Wilkes's disgrace was turned into
a triumph, and the metropolis rang with the applause of this worthless
individual.  Unhappily, the proceedings against him had involved
unconstitutional acts, which are sure to produce the indignation of a
free people, and to transform into a martyr a man who is really
criminal.  He was next convicted of publishing an indecent poem; but
again the improper means adopted to secure his conviction placed him
before the people as a ministerial victim, and diverted attention from
his flagrant vices.  But the reign of this demagogue in London,
properly speaking, did not begin till 1768, when he returned to
England, after a considerable absence, and offered himself as a
candidate for the city.  Though exceedingly popular, he failed to
obtain his election, but afterwards, with full success, he appealed to
the Middlesex constituency.  Then came the tug of war between the
electors and the House of Commons.  The latter invalidated the return,
in which the former persisted.  Riots were the consequence.  One
dreadful outbreak took place in St. George's-fields, when the military
were ordered to fire, and some were killed or wounded.  Three times
Wilkes was returned by the people to parliament, and three times the
parliament returned him to the people.  This violation of popular
rights was deeply resented in London, and throughout the country.  It
also made Wilkes's fortune; £20,000 were raised for him; all kinds of
presents were showered on the favorite; and his portrait, in every form
of art, was in universal request.  In the Common Pleas, he afterwards
obtained a verdict against Lord Halifax for false imprisonment and the
illegal seizure of papers.  He was subsequently elected sheriff,
alderman, and mayor of London; and finally, in 1779, sank down into
neglect much more comfortably than he deserved, as chamberlain of the
city.  His history singularly illustrates how illegal proceedings
defeat their object, though it be right; and how a rash eagerness in
pursuing the ends of justice overturns them.

In connection with the Wilkes affair, there is a remarkable episode in
the municipal history of the metropolis.  A most serious
misunderstanding took place between the monarch and the corporation.
The proceedings of ministers in reference to the Middlesex election,
led the civic authorities to present to the king a very strong
remonstrance, begging him to dissolve the parliament, and dismiss the
ministry.  The monarch took time to consider what reply he should make
to so formidable an application, and at length informed the corporation
that he was always ready to receive the requests and listen to the
complaints of his subjects, but it gave him concern to find that any
should have been so far misled as to offer a remonstrance, the contents
of which he considered disrespectful to himself, injurious to
parliament, and irreconcilable with the principles of the constitution.
Among the aldermen, there were some who disapproved of the
remonstrance, and now strongly protested against it; but Beckford, who
then, for the second time, filled the office of lord mayor, and
strongly felt with the common council, livery, and popular party,
earnestly resisted such opposition, and encouraged the citizens to
maintain their stand against what was considered an exercise of
arbitrary power on the part of government.  The mayor summoned the
livery, and delivered a speech just adapted to the assembly.  Another
remonstrance was drawn up, to be presented to his majesty by the lord
mayor and sheriffs.  To this the king replied, that he should have been
wanting to the public and himself, if he had not expressed his
dissatisfaction at their address.  Beckford, who must have been a bold
and eloquent man, breaking through all the rules of court etiquette,
delivered an extempore speech to the sovereign, which he concluded by
saying, "Permit me, sire, to observe, that whoever has already dared,
or shall hereafter endeavor, by false insinuations and suggestions, to
alienate your majesty's affections from your loyal subjects in general,
and from the city of London in particular, and to withdraw your
confidence in, and regard for, your people, is an enemy to your
majesty's person and family, a violator of public peace, and a betrayer
of our happy constitution, as it was established at the glorious and
necessary revolution."  Of course, no reply was given to this impromptu
address, but it seemed to have excited no little wonder among the
courtiers present on the occasion.  On the birth of the princess
Elizabeth, a short and loyal address of congratulation, avoiding all
controversial topics, was presented by the same chief magistrate; to
which his majesty answered, that so long as the citizens of London
addressed him with such professions, they might be sure of his
protection.  The stormy agitation was of brief continuance.  The
ripples on the stream soon subsided.  With this interview the good
understanding between the king and the city appears to have been
restored, though the bold remonstrance the latter had presented
produced no practical effect.  The popular lord mayor, who signalized
himself especially by his speech in the royal closet, was removed by
Divine Providence out of this life before the term of his mayoralty
expired.  After his decease, the citizens, to mark their esteem for his
character, erected a monument to him in Guildhall, and engraved on it
the speech which had given him so much celebrity.

The great dispute between the mother country and America, which began
as early as 1765, could not fail to excite a deep interest in the
capital of the empire.  "The sound of that mighty tempest," as it was
termed by Burke, was heard with deep concern at first by the London
merchants, as threatening to injure their commercial interests; and
when the Stamp Act, so odious from its influence in that respect, was
repealed soon after it was passed, the whole city beamed with gladness
and satisfaction.  When, however, America asserted her independence,
many in London, as well as in other parts of the country, felt their
national pride so much wounded, that they encouraged the war, till
finding the conflict with so distant and powerful a colony all in vain,
they were willing to hear of peace, though at the expense of losing the
chief part of the British territory in the western hemisphere.  But in
the feelings that the protracted struggle awakened, the metropolis only
shared in connection with the provinces; they must, therefore, be
passed over with this cursory notice, that we may attend to what
particularly constitutes the history of the city.

This plunges us at once amidst scenes of excitement, much more serious
and shocking than any others that have lately come under review.  In
1779, the Protestant Association was formed, in consequence of some of
the Roman Catholic disabilities being removed.  The society met at
Coachmakers' Hall, Noble-street, Foster-lane, under the presidency of
lord George Gordon, whose general eccentricity bordered upon madness,
and whose professed abhorrence of Popery sank into fanaticism.  The
association, in May, 1780, determined to petition for a repeal of the
Act just passed, and it was resolved that the whole body should attend
in St. George's-fields, on the second of June, to accompany lord George
with the petition to the House of Commons.  His lordship enforced this
motion with vehement earnestness, and said that if less than 20,000 of
his fellow-citizens attended him, he would not present the document.
At the time and place appointed, an immense multitude assembled,
computed at 50,000 or 60,000, wearing blue ribbons in their hats,
marshaled under standards displaying the words "No Popery."  In three
divisions they marched six abreast, over Londonbridge, towards
Westminster, being reinforced at Charing Cross by great numbers on
horseback and in carriages.  The then narrow avenues to the houses of
parliament were thronged by these crowds, and such members of the
legislature as they disliked were treated with insult, as they made
their way through the dense concourse.  The petition was presented; but
when that business was finished for which the populace had been invited
by the foolish nobleman, he found it impossible to disperse them.
Harangues, so potent in convening the host, were utterly powerless when
employed for their separation.  Nor did the magistracy attempt a timely
interference; but the mob was left to its own wild will, and like a
swollen torrent, which bursts its banks, it poured over the city with
destructive havoc.  The chapels of the Bavarian and Sardinian embassy
were pulled down that night.  On the next day, Saturday, they committed
no violence; but on Sunday they assailed a popish chapel and some
houses in Moorfields, within sight of the military, who stood by unable
to do anything, because they had no commands from the chief magistrate,
who alone could authorize them to act.  All that was done was to take a
few of the rioters into custody, while the rest were left without any
attempt at their dispersion.  Utterly unnerved, the lord mayor
virtually surrendered the city at this momentous crisis into the hands
of the mob.  Encouraged by the impunity with which they were left to
pursue their own course, they attacked on the next day the house of Sir
George Sackville, in Leicester-square, because he had moved the
Catholic Relief Bill.  On Tuesday, waxing bolder than ever, they
besieged the old prison of Newgate, where a few of their associates
were confined.  Breaking the roof, and tearing away the rafters, they
descended into the building by ladders, and rescued the prisoners.  Two
eye-witnesses, the poet Crabbe and Dr. Johnson, have left their
impressions of this extraordinary scene: "I stood and saw," says the
former of these writers, "about twelve women and eight men ascend from
their confinement to the open air, and conducted through the streets in
their chains.  Three of them were to be hanged on Friday.  You have no
conception of the frenzy of the multitude.  Newgate was at this time
open to all; anyone might get in, and what was never the case before,
anyone might get out."

"On Wednesday," says Dr. Johnson, "I walked with Dr. Scott, (lord
Stowell,) to look at Newgate, and found it in ruins, with the fire yet
glowing.  As I went by, the Protestants were plundering the
sessions-house at the Old Bailey.  There were not, I believe, a
hundred, but they did their work at leisure, in full security, without
sentinels, without trepidation, as men lawfully employed in full day."
Besides Newgate, lord Mansfield's house in Bloomsbury-square was pulled
down, and his valuable library burned.  The Fleet, King's Bench, the
Marshalsea, Wood-street Compter, and Clerkenwell Bridewell, were all
opened, and such a jail delivery effected as the citizens had never
witnessed before.  A stop was put to business on the Wednesday; shops
were closed; pieces of blue, the symbol of Protestant truth and zeal,
were required to be hung out of the windows, and "No Popery" chalked on
the doors.  Before night, even the Bank was assailed, but not without a
dreadful and destructive repulse from the military who garrisoned it,
and were ordered to act.  It is stated that the king, alarmed at the
danger of his capital, and indignant at the inaction of the
magistrates, took upon himself to command the services of the military
for putting down the riot.  While thirty fires were blazing in the
streets, and the inhabitants passed a sleepless night, full of anguish,
a large body of soldiers was engaged in the terrible, though necessary
work of suppressing the riot by force.  This was accomplished at the
expense of not less than five hundred lives.  By Friday, quietude was
restored.  Lord George Gordon was apprehended, but was acquitted upon
trial, his conduct not coming within the limits of the statute of
treason.  Sixty of the deluded creatures, who at first were excited by
his mischievous agitation however, had to pay the extreme penalty of
the law.  A happy contrast to this brutal kind of excitement has been
recently (1850-51) displayed in the calm, deep, and, for the most part,
intelligent resistance made to a far different measure--the papal
aggression, in the creation of territorial bishoprics; one really
calculated to excite far greater opposition.  The years 1780 and 1850,
stand out at the extremes of a period which has witnessed, in London
and elsewhere, a change in public thought and habit of the most
gratifying kind; and to what can this be so fairly ascribed, under the
providence and blessing of God, as to the increase of instruction,
especially religious instruction, through the medium of Sabbath and
other schools, together with the distribution of the Bible and tracts,
as well as other meliorating agencies operating on society?

Eight years after the anti-popery riots, another excitement, of a
different kind, rolled its waves over the public mind in London; not,
indeed, confined to the metropolis, but concentrating its force there,
as the scene of the occurrence which produced it.  This was the trial
of Warren Hastings, for his alleged mal-administration of Indian
affairs.  But the great length to which it was extended wearied out the
public patience, and ere the forensic business came to its close the
court was forsaken, and the numerous London circles, at first thrown
into a storm of feeling by the occurrence, resumed their former
quietude, and almost forgot the whole matter.

The same year that Hastings' trial commenced, the public sympathy and
sorrow were aroused in London, and throughout the nation, by the
melancholy mental illness of George III., but the next year his sudden
recovery created universal joy, which was demonstrated in the
metropolis, after the usual fashion.

  Then loyalty, with all his lamps
    New trimmed, a gallant show,
  Chasing the darkness and the damps,
    Set London in a glow.

  It was a scene, in every part,
    Like those in fable feigned,
  And seemed by some magician's hand
    Created and sustained.

On the 23d of April, a general thanksgiving was held for the king's
recovery, and on that account his majesty, accompanied by the royal
family, went in procession to attend public worship in St. Paul's
Cathedral; thus reminding us of the words of the Babylonish monarch,
"Mine understanding returned unto me, and I blessed the Most High, and
I praised and honored him that liveth forever, whose dominion is an
everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation to generation."

At the close of the eighteenth century, the proceedings of
revolutionary France sent a fresh stream of excitement through the
public mind of England.  On one side or the other, in sympathy with or
in aversion to the measures adopted on the opposite side of the
channel, most politicians, high and low, eagerly ranged themselves.
The efforts of Mr. Pitt to prevent anything like the enactment here of
what our neighbours were doing, were condemned or applauded by the two
parties according to the principles they espoused.  "The trials of
Hardy, Tooke, Thelwall, and others," says a minister, then a student
near the metropolis, "which took place not long after my entrance on
college life, agitated London to an extent which I have never seen
equaled, though my life has fallen on times and events of the most
prodigious and portentous character."--_Autobiography of the Rev. W.
Walford_.  Clubs were formed of a more than questionable description,
of which we remember to have received an illustrative anecdote from a
citizen of London, now gray-headed, but then in the flower of his
youth.  Invited by a person of about his own age to attend a meeting,
held in some obscure street, he was surprised on entrance to find a
number of men, ranged on either side a room, sitting beside long
tables, with one at the upper end, where sat the president for the
evening.  Several foaming tankards were brought in, when the president
calling on the company to rise, took up one of the vessels, and
striking off with his hand the foam that crested the porter, gave as a
toast, "So let all ---- perish."  The blank was left to be filled up as
each drinker pleased.  The avowed dislike to kings, entertained by the
boon companions there assembled, suggested to the visitor the word
intended for insertion, and he gladly left the place, not a little
alarmed lest he should be suspected of sympathy in treasonable designs.

Following political excitement came a monetary crisis, which struck a
panic through the body of London merchants; for, in 1797, the Bank of
England suspended its cash payments.  But after all these storms, which
severely tested its strength, the vessel of the state, under the
blessing of the Almighty, righted itself, and scenes of political calm
again smiled, and tides of commercial prosperity flowed upon old London.

In passing on to notice the general state of society in the metropolis
during the last half of the eighteenth century, it is painful to notice
the continuance of some of the revolting features which mark an earlier
age.  The old-fashioned burglaries, with the robberies and rogueries of
the highway, were still perpetrated.  A walk out of London after dark
was by no means safe; and therefore, at the end of a bill of
entertainment at Bellsize House, in the Hampstead-road, St.
John's-wood, there was this postscript--"For the security of the
guests, there are twelve stout fellows, completely armed, to patrol
between London and Bellsize, to prevent the insults of highwaymen and
footpads who infest the road."  To cross Hounslow-heath or
Finchley-common after sunset was a daring enterprise; nor did travelers
venture on it without being armed, and even ball-proof carriages were
used by some.  At Kensington and other places in the vicinity of
London, it was customary on Sunday evenings to ring a bell at
intervals, to summon those who were returning to town to form
themselves into a band, affording mutual protection, as they wended
their way homewards.  Town itself did not afford security; for George
IV. and the Duke of York, when very young men, were stopped one night
in a hackney-coach and robbed on Hay-hill, Berkeley-square.  The state
of the police, as these facts indicate, was most inefficient; but when
the law seized on its transgressors, it was merciless in the penalty
inflicted.  Long trains of prisoners, chained together, might be seen
marching through the streets on the way to jail, where the treatment
they received was cruel in the extreme, and much more calculated to
harden than to correct.  The number of executions almost exceeds
belief; and every approach to town exhibited a gibbet, with some
miserable creature hanging in chains.  These public spectacles missed
their professed object, and the frequent executions did anything but
check the commission of crime.  The lowest classes constantly assembled
to witness such spectacles, regarded them generally as mere matters of
amusement, or as affording opportunities for the indulgence of their
vices.

Some startling revelations of the state of things among London
tradesmen, as well as the lowest orders, were made before a select
committee of the House of Commons in 1835, relative to the period fifty
years earlier.  "The conduct of tradesmen," said one of the witnesses,
"was exceedingly gross as compared with that of the same class at the
present time.  Decency was a very different thing from what it is now;
their manners were such as scarcely to be credited.  I made inquiries a
few years ago, and found that between Temple-bar and Fleet-market,
there were many houses in each of which there were more books than all
the tradesmen's houses in the streets contained when I was a youth."
He mentions, also, the open departure of thieves from certain
public-houses, wishing one another success--"In Gray's-inn-lane," he
remarks, "was the Blue Lion, commonly called the Blue Cat.  I have seen
the landlord of this place come into the room with a large lump of
silver in his hand, which he had melted for the thieves, and pay them
for it.  There was no disguise about it.  It was done openly."  "At the
time I am speaking of, there were scarcely any houses on the eastern
side of Tottenham-court-road; there, and in the long fields, were
several large ponds; the amusement here was duck-hunting and
badger-baiting; they would throw a cat into the water, and set dogs at
her; great cruelty was constantly practised, and the most abominable
scenes used to take place.  It is almost impossible for any person to
believe the atrocities of low life at that time, which were not, as
now, confined to the worst paid and most ignorant of the populace."

Turning to look for a moment at the opposite extreme of society, it is
delightful to mark the improvement which had there taken place.  While
drawing-rooms and levees were held as before, though less frequent, the
former being confined to once a week; while equipages of similar
fashion as formerly continued to roll through the parks, Piccadilly,
and the Mall; while the costumes and habits of courtiers exhibited no
great variation; while theatres, and other places of amusement, were
frequented by the fashionables; while gossiping calls in the morning,
and gay parties at night, were the common and every-day incidents of
West-end life--a very obvious improvement arose in the morals and
general tone of feeling of people about court, in consequence of the
exemplary and virtuous character of George III. and Queen Caroline.
Fond of quiet and domestic repose, retiring into the bosom of their
family, surrounded by a few favorite dependents, encouraging a taste
for reading and music, and ever frowning upon vice in all its forms,
they exerted a powerful influence upon those around them, and turned
the palace into a completely different abode from what it had been in
the time of the earlier Georges.  Religion, too, if not in its earnest
spirituality, yet in its decorous observances and its moral bearings,
was maintained and promoted, both by royal precept and example.  The
monarch and his family were accustomed to attend regularly upon the
services in the chapel attached to St. James's Palace.

The revival of religion in London, to which we adverted in a former
chapter, produced permanent results.  During the last half of the
century, Christian godliness continued to advance.  Whitefield's
labors, as often as he visited the metropolis, produced a deep
impression on the multitudes who, in chapels or the open air, were
eager to hear him.  Whitefield died in America, but a monument is
erected to his memory in Tottenham-court Chapel, the walls of which
often echoed with his fervid oratory.  Wesley's exertions were
prolonged till the year 1792.  After a life of most energetic effort in
the cause of Christ, this remarkable man expired at his house in
London, 1791, in the eighty-eighth year of his age.

The countess of Huntingdon, Whitefield's early friend, exerted in
London a powerful religious influence, "scattering the odors of the
Saviour's name among mitres and coronets, and bearing a faithful
testimony to her Divine Master in the presence of royalty itself."  She
has left behind her in the metropolis two remarkable proofs of her
religious liberality and zeal, in Zion and Spafields Chapels, both of
which she was the means of transforming out of places of amusement into
houses for the service and praise of God.

The labors of Mr. Romaine, the minister of St. Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe
and St. Anne, Blackfriars, claim special notice.  Previous to his
induction to those parishes, he had preached at St. Dunstan's and St.
George's, Hanover-square, exciting great attention, and, by the
benediction of God, enjoying great success.  The parishioners in the
latter church were sometimes incommoded by the vast concourse who came
to hear this evangelical clergyman.  On one occasion, the Earl of
Northampton rebuked them for complaining of the inconvenience,
observing that they bore with patience the crowded ball-room or
play-house.  "If," he said, "the power to attract be imputed as matter
of admiration to Garrick, why should it be urged as a crime against
Romaine?  Shall excellence be considered exceptionable only in Divine
things?"  Mr. Romaine was strongly opposed by some who disapproved of
his sentiments, and was soon turned out of St. George's Church; after
which the countess of Huntingdon made him her chaplain for awhile, in
which office he preached in her drawing-room to the nobility, in her
kitchen to the poor.  Her house, where these services were performed,
was in Park-street.  Settled, at length, as the rector of the two
churches above-named, this eminent servant of Christ--of whom it has
been said that he was a diamond, rough often, but very pointed, and the
more he was broken by years the more he appeared to shine--pursued
uninterruptedly his holy and edifying ministrations till the time of
his death in 1795.  He was interred in St. Andrew's Church, where a
monument, not devoid of artistic beauty, and executed by the elder
Bacon, a well-known sculptor of that day, distinguishes the place of
his remains.  In 1780, there came to minister in the parish of St. Mary
Woolnoth another individual, whose praise is in all the churches.  This
was John Newton, the friend of the poet Cowper.  He lies buried in the
edifice where he loved to proclaim the glorious Gospel of the blessed
God; and on the tablet raised as a memorial of his worth is inscribed
the following succinct account of his eventful life and of his
character, so illustrative of Divine grace, in words written by
himself: "John Newton, clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant
of slaves in Africa, was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour,
Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach
the faith he had long labored to destroy."

Rowland Hill, originally a clergyman of the establishment, and never
fully sympathizing with any dissenting denomination, though confessing
to many clerical irregularities, occupies a distinguished place among
the men who devoted themselves to the faithful preaching of the Gospel
in the metropolis.  Surrey Chapel, which has proved a school in which
many spirits have been trained for the celestial world, was erected by
him in Blackfriars-road, 1782, and there till his death he continued to
preach.

Two very celebrated prelates filled the see of London during this
eventful period in the history of religion: Dr. Lowth, the elegant
scholar and able commentator, who was translated to London in 1777; and
Dr. Porteus, who succeeded him on his death in 1786, and though
inferior in talents and learning, earned for himself a considerable
literary reputation as a Christian divine, and distinguished his
episcopate, which lasted till 1808, by his pious diligence and catholic
charity.

Science, literature, and art, were promoted in London during the period
before us, by the establishment of several well-known institutions.
The British Museum was formed in 1753, in consequence of the will of
Sir Hans Sloane, who bequeathed his large collection of curiosities to
government for £20,000, which was £30,000 less than they cost him.  An
act of parliament was passed for their purchase, and Montague House,
Bloomsbury, was taken and fitted up for the reception of Sloane's
treasures, and other collections, scientific and literary, upon which
great sums of money were expended.  The Royal Academy, for the
encouragement and improvement of British artists and sculptors, was
constituted in 1768, and the first public exhibition was made at
Somerset House in 1780.  The Royal Institution in Albemarle-street was
opened in 1799.  The College of Surgeons was incorporated in 1800.

Other institutions, sacred to humanity and benevolence, and fraught
with great benefit to multitudes of our suffering race, were originated
within the last fifty years of the eighteenth century.  In 1755,
Middlesex Hospital was founded, the generous exertions which led to it
having begun some years earlier.  Three years later, the Magdalen
Hospital, for the reformation and relief of penitent females, was
opened in Prescott-street, Goodman-fields, and afterwards transferred
to an appropriate building, erected for the purpose in St.
George's-fields, in 1709.  The foundation-stone of the Lying-in
Hospital, on the Surrey side of Westminster-bridge, was laid in 1765;
and a similar institution was begun in the City-road in 1770.  The
Royal Humane Society, for the recovery of persons from drowning,
commenced in 1774.  The Royal Literary Fund, for the relief of poor
authors, was instituted in 1790.

The religious societies of London, whose character adorns the English
capital, eclipsing its artistic and commercial splendour, chiefly
belong to the present century.  The London Missionary Society, however,
for preaching the Gospel of Christ among the heathen, began as early as
1795.  The declaration of the Society was signed at the Castle and
Falcon, Aldersgate-street.  In the year 1709 was formed, also, the
institution by which the present volume is issued--the Religious Tract
Society.  Commencing with small beginnings, it has, through the
prospering hand of God upon its labors, been privileged to proclaim the
unsearchable riches of Christ in one hundred and ten languages and
dialects; and, in the course of half a century, to circulate its varied
messengers of mercy to the vast amount of five hundred millions of
copies.

Since the conclusion of the eighteenth century, London has undergone an
unprecedented change, upon which the limits of this volume will not
allow us to touch.  The city, which is still swelling every year, in a
degree which, if Horace, Walpole were living, would fill him with
greater surprise than ever, is really new London.  Few of the principal
streets exhibit the appearance they did fifty years ago, and the
architectural alteration is but a type of the social one.  The superior
sanitary arrangements, the more efficient police, the better education
of most classes of society, the augmented provision for religious
instruction and worship, the more decidedly evangelical tone of
preaching in the metropolitan pulpits, and the increase of real piety
amongst the population, must strike everyone, on even a superficial
comparison of the past and present; and when we consider the great
change wrought in half a century, it inspires encouragement in relation
to the future.  The impulse which things have received of late has been
so mighty, that there is no calculating the acceleration of their
future progress.  Thus the remembrance of the past yields advantage,
and we pluck hopes, "like beautiful wild flowers from the ruined tombs
that border the highways of antiquity, to make a garland for the living
forehead."--_Coleridge_.  On taking a longer reach of comparison, an
amount of wonder is inspired not to be adequately expressed.  Had some
sage in the Roman senate, two thousand years ago, proclaimed that the
day would come, when an obscure town, situated on the Thames, a river
scarcely known then to the Latin geographer, would vie with the city in
which they were assembled on the Tiber, nay, eclipse it, and wax in
glory while the other waned, that prediction would have strangely
crossed their pride, and would have been indignantly pronounced
incredible.  Yet that day has come.  The British town, then a mere
inclosure, containing a few huts, has swelled into a city teeming with
a population of above two millions, crowded with public buildings and
costly habitations, filled with commerce, wealth, and luxury, the
mirror of modern civilization, the metropolis of a mighty empire, and
the wonder of the world--while the Roman city, then the mightiest and
most splendid on the face of the earth, and the mistress of the globe,
so far as its regions were discovered, retains no traces of her glory,
and is chiefly interesting on account of her ancient name and
associations.

Happily the genius of civilization in the two cities is completely
diverse.  In the early days of the Roman kingdom and republic, the
people fought in self-defence; in later times, from a pure thirst for
glory and dominion.  In the best periods of its history, the virtues of
the citizens were of the martial cast, and found a fostering influence
in all the institutions of the state.  To Rome, which then cradled a
warlike people, London presents a contrast on which we look with
satisfaction.  London is the type of commercial civilization.  The
merchant, not the soldier, is most prominent and influential.  The
inhabitants of the English metropolis and country, it may be safely
asserted, are looking not to armies as sources of greatness, and
objects for gratulation, but to the busy thousands who are deepening
and spreading the resources of national wealth by their commercial and
manufacturing industry.  The spirit of mercantile enterprise is as
strongly stamped upon the English character, in their metropolis of the
nineteenth century, as the spirit of war was stamped upon the character
of the Romans in their metropolis before the Christian era.  Rome had
her trade as well as her army--her Ostia, whither her vessels brought
for her use the luxuries of the East; but it was not there, but to the
Campus Martius, where their legions performed their evolutions, that
the stranger would have been taken to see the greatness of the
republic.  So the metropolis of the British empire is the rendezvous of
a great military establishment, as well as an emporium of merchandise;
but it is to the scenes on the borders of the Thames, to her spacious
docks, her crowded shipping, her stores and warehouses, with all the
accompaniments of busy commerce, presenting a spectacle which perfectly
overpowers the mind with wonder--it is to those scenes that we should
take the stranger, to impress him with an idea of the greatness of our
chief city.  The Hyde Park review, with cuirasses and swords glittering
in the sun, and martial music floating through the air, affords a
brilliant holiday entertainment, but all must feel that the English
spirit of the nineteenth century is not there expressed.  It is very
true that the love of war has not lost its hold entirely on the public
mind; that there are many who still pant for the conflict, and for the
honors and prizes which successful warfare brings; but, we repeat it,
the spirit of the nineteenth century is not there expressed, but it
finds its exponent in the earnest activity which is ever witnessed
round the neighborhood of London-bridge and the Exchange.  The time is
coming--is already come, when, as most intelligent men turn over the
pages of the world's history, they award the palm of the noblest
civilization to London, a city full of merchants and artisans, rather
than to Rome, a city full of soldiers, flushed with the pride of
victory, and drunk with the blood of the slain.

In all that relates to the state of society, the genius of the people,
public opinion, general intelligence, taste, feeling, character--the
comparison is decidedly in favor of the English capital.  This is to be
ascribed to many causes--to the intermingling of races, an insular
position, political revolutions, enlarged experience, providential
discoveries, and the creation of sentiments and opinions during
centuries of mental activity; but, above all, it is to be ascribed to
Christianity, which has long had a strong hold upon the hearts of
multitudes, and which has indirectly exercised a most beneficial reflex
influence upon the character of others, who have little regard for its
doctrinal principles.  The richest forms of modern civilization in
London are founded on our religion.  The elevation of woman to her
proper rank, the improved character of the judicial code, the
extinction of domestic slavery, the elevation of serfs of the soil to
freemen having an estate in their own labor, the value set on life, the
philanthropic institutions which abound--are all the results of
evangelical light and principle.  Let any one walk through the streets
of London, and compare the aspect of things with what was exhibited to
the man who walked through the streets of ancient Rome--and with all
the vice and misery which exist in the former, there are found elements
of social welfare, the acknowledged creation of Christian morals, at
work, unknown in the latter.  Indications of intelligence, peace,
freedom, and charity, are found here, which were wanting there.  The
power and permanence of London must depend upon her morality and
religion.

We look with intense interest to the young men of London.  With pain,
such as we cannot describe, we regard the gay, the dissolute, the
intemperate--those who drown the higher faculties of the soul in
sensual indulgence, who degrade their mental, moral, and spiritual
nature, and, forgetting their relationship to angels, sink to the level
of the brutes that perish.  With pleasure, however, equally
indescribable, we turn to the steady, the sober, the virtuous, the
enlightened--those who labor after mental improvement, and especially
those who seek spiritual excellence, who ask and practically answer the
question, "While I am attending to the intellectual culture of the
mind, ought I not to prepare for that eternity to which I am hastening,
where moral and spiritual character will be all in all?" and who,
repairing to the word of God, the source of all religious wisdom, have
become the subjects of a discipline, which adorns the intellect with
the beauties of sanctity, and prepares the soul for the vision and
worship of heaven.  Of such, London may well say with the mother of the
Gracchi, but in a far more important sense, "These are my jewels."

Let it be the endeavor, as it is the duty of London citizens, to aid
all wise schemes for its physical and intellectual amelioration, but
especially such as relate to morals and religion.  With a clear eye, a
loving heart, a steady hand, and a determined will, each must apply
himself to pulling down the evil, and building up the good.  The moral
health of a city should be the care of all its members.  The most
precious object amidst the multitude of precious things in the chief
city of England is the citizen himself.  Man, out of whose intellect,
energy, and power, all the rest has grown--man, in whose capacities are
found the germs of a greatness, the cultivation of which will a
thousand times repay the toil it involves.  The noblest of enterprises,
be it remembered, is to be found, not in commercial speculation, or
political reform, or even literary and scientific knowledge, but in the
promotion of Christ's holy and saving religion, and in the recovery and
purification of the soul, through faith in him, and its preparation for
other realms of being in the infinite Hereafter.  The enduring
magnificence of such labor and its results exceeds all the doings of
earthly ambition, even as the mighty Alps and Andes surpass the houses
of ice and snow which children in their sports build up, and which are
melting away before that sun in whose rays they glitter.



THE END.




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