OLD LONDON BRIDGE

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Martyr. The view was eminently picturesque, with the many and irregular pointed arches of the bridge; the rush of water in foaming cascades through the narrow openings; the weathered stonework, and the curious old oil-lamps; and the soaring Monument

with the fantastic spire of St. Magnus, seen from Southwark, in the background. This was the aspect of Old London Bridge at any time between 1750, when the houses that had been for centuries standing on it were removed, and 1831, when the bridge itself was destroyed with pick and shovel. In previous

ages there were gates both at the London and the Southwark ends, and on these fortified gateways were stuck the heads of many traitors to the State and martyrs to religious opinions. The heads of Sir William Wallace, Jack Cade, Bishop Fisher of Rochester, Sir Thomas More, and of many another, were once to be seen here; and in Queen Elizabeth's time, when John Visscher made a drawing of London Bridge, so many were the rotting skulls that the Southwark gate-house wore not so much the appearance of an entry into the capital of a civilized kingdom as that of a doorway to some Giant Blunderbore's bloodstained castle.

"Bridge Foot" was the name of the Southwark end of London Bridge. It was a narrow lane leading to Southwark High Street, paved with knobbly stones and walled in with tall houses. Bridge Foot is a thing of the past, and London Bridge Station stands on the site of it. "High Street, Borough," too, is very different from not only medieval days, but even from coaching times. The many old inns that used to front toward the street, dating their prosperity back to the twelfth century, and their fabric to some time subsequently to the fire of 1676, are nearly all either utterly demolished, or are put to use as railway receiving offices for goods. The "Queen's Head" is being torn down even as I write these lines; the "George," most interesting of all that remain here, is threatened; the "Spur" is left, little changed; the "Half Moon" is still the house for a good chop or steak and a tankard of ale; but the "White Hart," where is it? Where the " Where the "Tabard," the "King's

OLD SOUTHWARK INNS

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Head," the "Catherine Wheel," the "Boar's Head," the "Old Pick my Toe," or the "Three Widows"? In vain will the curious who pay pilgrimage to Southwark seek them. There still are many cavernous doorways, stone-flagged passages, and great courtyards; but nothing more romantic than railway vans is to be seen in the most of them, and the yard where

Sam Weller was first introduced to an admiring public is quite gone.

The most romantically named of the Southwark inns now left is undoubtedly the "Blue Eyed Maid," so named, possibly, in connection with Tamplin's "Blue Eyed Maid" coach that used to run between. Southwark and Rochester in the twenties. The

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building, though, does not share the romanticism of its name. Near it, let into the seventeenth-century brick frontage of No. 71, High Street, is the old sign of the "Hare and Sun," the trade-mark of Nicholas Hare; and this, together with the stone half-moon sign in the yard of the "Half Moon Inn," is the sole relic of the many devices that once decorated the street. The hop-trade has taken almost undivided possession of the place nowadays. The Hop Exchange is over the way, and hop-factors are as frequently to be met with here as diamond-merchants in Hatton Garden; and with their coming the oldfashioned appearance of Southwark High Street is

gone.

Even when Hogarth painted his "Southwark Fair," in 1733, the street was suburban, and in the distance, seen between the crowds gathered round old St. George's Church, are the hills and dales of Kent. The church was pulled down in the following year, and the present building put up in its place. The fair was suppressed in 1762.

At that time, Kent Street was the only way to the Dover Road, and, even then, the dirt and overcrowding in that notorious thoroughfare were phenomenal. Englishmen were ashamed of this disgraceful entrance into London, and one whose duty lay in bringing a representative foreigner from Dover to London craftily contrived that he should enter the Metropolis at night, when the dirty tenements of Kent Street, by which their carriage would pass, would be hidden in darkness. When Newington Causeway was made, and direct access gained to the