length and for breadth." It was not finished for more than two hundred years, and after it was finished, there were from time to time cumbrous additions. At length the great fire of London swept all away, and gave space and opportunity for the present building.

We have not room for Mr. Hunt's description of the old edifice, and its successive additions, nor could we hope to render any description of it intelligible, without the aid of pictorial illustrations. Hunt gives us a spirited engraving of the west front of old St. Paul's, with Inigo Jones's portico. Nothing could be more incongruous with the rest of the building than this Corinthian portico, which, singly considered, was a beautiful composition. "Fourteen columns, each rising to the lofty height of forty-six feet, were so disposed, that eight, with two pilasters placed in front, and three in each flank, formed a square (oblong) peristyle, and supported an entablature and balustrade which was crowned with the statues of kings, who claimed the honour of the fabric:-*

"It is of the cathedral, as thus renovated, that Sir John Denham speaks in the following passage of his 'Cooper's Hill':

666

That sacred pile, so vast, so high,
That whether it's a part of earth or sky,
Uncertain seems, and may be thought a proud
Aspiring mountain, or descending cloud;
Paul's, the late name of such a muse whose flight
Has bravely reach'd and soar'd above thy height;
Now shalt thou stand, though sword, or time, or
fire,

Or zeal more fierce than they, thy fall conspire,
Secure, whilst thee, the best of poets, sings,
Preserv'd from ruin by the best of kings.'

"The best of poets' is his brother courtier Waller, who had some time before written his verses Upon his Majesty's repairing of St. Paul's,' in which he compares King Charles, for his regeneration of the Cathedral, to Amphion and other antique minstrels,' who were said to have achieved architectural feats by the power of music, and who he says:—

“Sure were Charles-like kings, Cities their lutes, and subjects' hearts their strings; On which with so divine a hand they strook, Consent of motion from their breath they took.'

"Jones's first labour, the removal of the various foreign encumbrances that had so long oppressed and deformed

*

the venerable edifice, Waller commemorates by a pair of references to St. Paul's history, not unhappily applied: he says the whole nation had combined with his majesty

to grace

The Gentiles' great Apostle, and deface
Those state-obscuring sheds, that like a chain,
Seem'd to confine and fetter him again;
Which the glad Saint shakes off at his command,
As once the viper from his sacred kand.'

"Denham's prediction did no credit to the prophetic reputation of poetry. Of the fabric which was to be unassailable by zeal or fire, the poet himself lived to see the ruin, begun by the one, and completed by the other; and he himself, curiously enough, a short time before his death, was engaged as the king's surveyor-general in (nominally at least) presiding over the erection of the new cathedral. the successor of the 'sacred pile,' of which he had thus sung the immortality.”—pp. 34–36.

The incongruities of architecture, where you had a Corinthian portico with a Gothic pediment, and obelisks, and turrets, was "nothing to the several deformities" within. Old St. Paul's was from the first "a den of thieves." To go round the wall of the churchyard, was felt by the busy Londoners to be too great a circuit; and, even in the reign of Henry III, the church itself became a thoroughfare. Loiterers, led by devotion or love, lingered in the aisles, or round the altars. In the reign of Edward III. the king complains that the eating-room of the canons had become "the office and workplace of artisans, and the resort of shameless women.' Kings remonstrated, and bishops fulminated mandates and excommunications in vain. Parliaments tried their hand with not much better success. From an Act of Philip and Mary the church appears to have been a common passage, not only for beer, fried fish, flesh, &c., but for mules, horses, and other beasts. In Elizabeth's reign idlers and drunkards were allowed to sleep on the benches at the choir-door.

Are we to consider the uses in which great portions of the church were employed as encroachments on the rights of the dignitaries, in whom the property was vested, or were they parties to the kind of tenancy in which it

seems to have been held in great Eliza's golden days?"

Of the chantry and smaller chapels, some were used as storehouses-one was a school, another was a glazier's shop, and the author, from whom we transcribe the last fact, says that the windows were always broken. Part of the vaults beneath the church were occupied by a carpenter, the remainder was held by the bishop, the dean, and the canons ; "one vault, thought to have been used for a burial-place, was converted into a wine-cellar, and a way had been cut into it through the walls of the building itself." Houses

were built against the walls, one was a playhouse, another a bakery, with a place for the oven excavated in the cathedral wall.

"The middle of St. Paul's," we transcribe from Mr. Hunt, "was also the Bond-street of the period,' and remained so until the time of the Commonwealth. The loungers were called Paul's walkers." "The walkers in Paul's," says Mr. Malcolm, "during Elizabeth's and the following reigns, were composed of a motley assembly of the gay, the vain, the dissolute, the idle, the knavish, and the lewd." In Ben Johnson's "Every Man out of his Humour," we find that advertisements were posted on the columns in the aisle, and Shakspeare makes Falstaff say of Bardolph, "I bought thee in Paul's." In William and Mary's time it would seem that treasonable meetings were held here by the Jacobites.

Of the boy-bishop, and of some of the old pageants, we have amusing accounts, taken from the ordinary

sources of information on such subjects, but very pleasantly and conveniently brought together. The fortunes of the church, and the varied scenes enacted through the great changes of religious opinion, are then dwelt on till we come to the days of the Commonwealth :

"The parliamentary soldiers annoyed the inhabitants of the churchyard by playing at nine-pins at unseasonable hours a strange misdemeanour for that church militant.' They hastened, also, the destruction of the cathedral. Some scaffolding, set up for repairs, had been given them for arrears of pay. They dug pits in the body of the church to saw the timber in; and they removed the scaffolding with so little caution, that great part of the vaulting fell in, and lay a heap of ruins. The east end only and a part of the choir, continued to be used for public worship, a brick wall being raised to separate this portion from the rest of the building, and the congregation entering and getting out through one of the north windows. Another part of the church was converted into barracks and stables for the dragoons. As for Inigo Jones's lofty and beautiful portico, it was turned into 'shops,' says Maitland, for milliners and others, with rooms over them for the convenience of lodging; at the erecting of which the magnificent columns were piteously mangled, being obliged to make way for the end of beams, which penetrated their centres.' The statues on the top were thrown down, and broken to pieces."-p. 62.

6

The fire of London destroyed the old building. But let us listen to Dryden. The passage is one of the noblest in English poetry:

The last lines of our quotation are, perhaps, inferior to the rest, and some of the imagery is too fanciful to fall in well with so high a strain; but we have no doubt that the more the pas sage which we have transcribed is studied, the more it will be admired.

Hunt does not linger long at St. Paul's. We hear nothing of service or sermons; and perhaps they would be unsuitable to the light context of his book. The booksellers of the churchyard, as he calls them, are more to his taste; and we have some mention of Mr. Johnson, who published Cowper's works, and gave dinners to Darwin, Goodwin, and others, among of whom Mr. Hunt incidentally mentions Cowper. The poet and his bookseller never met; indeed this we learn from Hunt himself. Newberry's children's books are praised for their gingerbread covers, gilt with gold; and Mr. Hunt is quite right in thinking that the covers were the best part of them. The fairy tales and Arabian nights, were worth all Newberry's library, including Goody Two Shoeswhich it is the foolish fashion to impute to Goldsmith-ten thousand times told.

We must pass rapidly over the storied ground of Creed-lane, Ave Maria-lane, Paternoster-row, Amencorner, &c.; only borrowing from Mr. Hunt, the fact or fancy, that "close to Sermon-lune is Do-littlelane."

Doctors' Commons and domestic infidelities next follow in natural association. The repository of lost wills and testaments remind Mr. Hunt of Milton and the squabbles that Warton disinterred from the records of the Prerogative, of Shakespere, and his bequest of his "second-best bed" to his wife, which Malone examined with such sad seriousness, and Steevens with such malicious pleasantry, plainly for the purpose of vexing Malone. Hunt tells us, gravely," that the question is most unexpectedly, as well as happily cleared up by Mr. Charles Knight, who shows that the bequest was to the lady's honour." The big wigs of the prerogative and consistorial courts,

do not supply our lively friend with many favourable recollections" of the practisers in the civil courts; we can call to mind nothing more worthy than the strange name of one of them, 'Sir Julius Cæsar,' and his ruinous volatility of poor Dr. King. The doctor practised too much with the bottle, which hindered him from adhering long to anything."

"Behind Little Knight-Riders'-street, to the east of Doctors' Commons, is the Heralds' College. A gorgeous idea of colours falls on the mind in passing it, as from a cathedral window,

"And shielded scutcheons blush with blood of queens and kings.- Keats.

The passenger, if he is a reader conver sant with old times, thinks of bannered halls, of processions of chivalry, and of the fields of Cressy and Poictiers, with their vizored knights, distinguished by their coats and crests; for a coat of arms is nothing but a representation of the knight himself, from whom the bearer is descended. The shield supposes his body; there is the helmet for his head, with the crest upon it; the flourish in his mantle; and he stands upon the ground of his motto, or moral pretension. The supporters, if he is noble, or of a particular class of knighthood, are thought to be the pages that waited upon him, designated by the fantastic dresses of bear, lion, &c. &c., which they sometimes wore. Heraldry is full of colour and imagery, and attracts the fancy like a book of pictures.' The Kings-at-Arms are romantic personages, really crowned, and have as mystic appellations as the kings of an old tale,-Garter, Clarencieux, and Norroy. Norroy is King of the North, and Clarencieux (a title of Norman origin) of the South. The heralds, Lancaster, Somerset, &c., have simpler names, indicative of the counties over which they preside: but are only less gorgeously dressed than the kings, in emblazonment and satin; and then there are the four pursuivants, Rouge Croix, Rouge Dragon, Portcullis, and Blue Mantle, with hues as lively, and appellations as quaint, as the attendants on a fairy court. For gorgeousness of attire, mysteriousness of origin, and, in fact, for similarity of origin (a knave being a squire), a knave of cards is not unlike a herald.

A story is told of an

Irish King at Arms, who, waiting upon the Bishop of Killaloe to summon him to parliament, and being dressed as the ceremony required, in his heraldic attire, so mystified the bishop's servant with his appearance, that not knowing what to make of it, and carrying off but a confused notion of his title, he announced him thus: My lord, here is the King of Trumps.'"-pp. 82, 83.

The dangers of walking the streets in London is the subject of an amusing poem, by Gay. The ubiquity of the police in our days and nights protect us from some of the more obvious dangers. Yet, if we were led to think of what men escape, it will be in general considered that the plunder of the swell-mob, or the assaults of footpads, are the most serious evils that have been got rid of, or at least greatly diminished. Not at all! listen to what Leigh Hunt tells you of a century ago, and rejoice :—

"How impossible it would now be, in a neighbourhood like this, for such nuisances to exist as a fetid public ditch, and scouts of degraded clergymen asking people to walk in and be married!' Yet such was the case a century ago. At the bottom of Ludgate-hill the little river Fleet formerly ran, and was rendered navigable. In Fleet market is Seacoal-lane, so called from the barges that landed coal there; and Turnagain-lane, at the bottom of which the unadvised passenger found himself compelled by the water to retrace his steps. The water gradually got clogged and foul; and the channel was built over, and made a street. But even in the time we speak of, this had not been entirely done. The ditch was open from Fleet market to the river, occupying the site of the modern Bridge-street; and in the market, before the door of the Fleet prison, men plied in behalf of a clergyman, literally inviting people to walk in and be married. They performed the ceremony inside the prison, to sailors and others, for what they could get. It was the most squalid of Gretnas, bearding the decency and common sense of a whole metropolis. The parties retired to a gin-shop to treat the clergyman; and there, and in similar houses, the register was kept of the marriages. Not far from the Fleet is Newgate; so that the victims had their succession of nooses prepared, in case, as no doubt it often happened, one tie should be followed by the others. Pennant speaks of this nuisance from personal knowledge :

"In walking along the streets in my youth,' he tells us, on the side next this prison, I have often been tempted by the question, "Sir, will you be pleased to walk in and be married." Along this most lawless space was frequently hung up the sign of a male and female hand conjoined, with Marriages performed within, written beneath. A dirty fellow invited you in. The parson was seen walking before his shop-a squalid, profligate figure, clad in a tattered plaid night-gown, with a fiery face, and ready to couple you for a dram of gin or roll of tobacco. Our great chancellor, Lord Hardwicke, put these demons to flight, and saved thousands from the misery and disgrace which would be entailed by these extemporary, thoughtless unions.'

To

"This extraordinary disgrace to the city, which arose most likely from the permission to marry prisoners, and one great secret of which was the advantage taken of it by wretched women to get rid of their debts, was maintained by a collusion between the warden of the Fleet and the disreputable clergymen he became acquainted with. such an extent,' says Malcolm, 'were the proceedings carried, that twenty and thirty couple were joined in one day, at from ten to twenty shillings each;' and between the 19th of October, 1704, and the 12th of February, 1705, 2,954 marriages were celebrated (by evidence), besides others known to have been omitted. To these, neither licence nor certificate of bauns were required, and they concealed, by private marks, the names of those who chose to pay them for it.' The neigbourhood at length complained; and the abuse was put an end to by the Marriage Act, to which it gave rise.”—pp. 106, 107.

But we are in Fleet-street. It is not the year 1848, but 1679, or thereabouts, and we, the English people, are in a perfect fury of Protestantism. We suspect the king, not without reason; we fear and detest the duke, and we will celebrate the birthday of Queen Elizabeth whether the court likes it or not; and we will have our old pageants, let who will oppose.

It is necessary to begin our description at an earlier stage of the ceremonial than that with which Leigh Hunt commences, and we find it desirable to weave our account of the matter from two narratives drawn up by members of opposite factions, who are, however, describing the procession as enacted in two different years.

The bells of the churches began to