ONE of the most remarkable pictures of ancient manners which has been transmitted to us is that in which the poet Gower describes the circumstances under which he was commanded by King Richard II.

"To make a book after his hest."

The good old rhymer,-"the moral Gower," as Chaucer calls him,-who probably resided in Southwark, where his monument may yet be seen in the church of St. Mary Overies, had taken boat; and upon the broad river he met the king in his stately barge. It was an accidental meeting, he tells us. The monarch, who had come most probably from his palace of Westminster, where even thousands ministered, it is said, to his luxurious tastes, espied the familiar face of the minstrel, and stopped him upon that great highway of London, which was an open road for the meanest as for the highest. He called him on board his own vessel, and desired him to book "some new thing." This was the origin of the 'Confessio Amantis.' But the poet shall record the story in his own simple words:

As it befel upon a tide,

As thing which should then betide,
Under the towné of New Troy,
Which took of Brute his firsté joy;

B

In Thames, when it was flowing,
As I by boaté came rowing,
So as fortune her time set,
My liege lord perchance I met,
And so befel, as I came nigh,
Out of my boat, when he me sygh,*
He bade me come into his barge :
And when I was with him at large,
Among other thingés said

He hath this charge upon me laid,
And bade me do my business,
That to his high worthiness
Some new thingé I should book,
That he himself it might look,
After the form of my writing.
And thus upon his commanding.
Mine hearté is well the more glad

To writé so as he me bade."

Nothing can be more picturesque than this description, and nothing can more forcibly carry us into the very heart of the past. With the exception of some of the oldest portions of the Tower of London, there is scarcely a brick or a stone left standing that may present to us a memorial of "the king's chamber"† of four hundred and fifty years ago. There, indeed, is the river, still flowing and still ebbing,—the most ancient thing we can look upon,—which made London what it was and what it is. Nearly all that then adorned its banks has perished; and many of the stirring histories of the busy life that moved upon its waters have become to us as obscure as the legend of "New Troy." But the poet calls upon our imagination to fill up the void.

One of the most ancient pictorial representations of London which exists is of a date some fifty years later than the poem we have quoted. It is found in a manuscript preserved in the British Museum, and represents the captivity of the Duke of Orleans in the Tower. The manuscript itself, which consists of the poems of the royal captive, was probably copied in the time of Henry VI.; but the illumination purports to represent the London of an earlier date, with its bridge, its lofty-spired cathedral, its numerous churches, its gabled houses. Under these walls we may imagine the poet and his patron to have glided, amidst crowded wherries, and attendant barges, and the merry sounds of song and clarion, and the shouts of the people. Often had the "imaginative" king so passed between his palace of Westminster and his Tower of London. But the state was to end in misery, and degradation, and a solitary and mysterious death. The Prologue' of Gower, in the true spirit of the romantic times, tells us of the town which was founded by the Trojan Brute. Here was the fable which the middle-age minstrels rejoiced in, and which History has borrowed from Poetry without any compromise of her propriety. The origin of nations must be fabulous; and if we would penetrate into the dark past we must be satisfied with the torch-light which fable presents to us. We commend, therefore, the belief of the good citizens of London, who, in the time of Henry VI., sent the king a copy of an ancient tract, which says of London, "According to the credit of chronicles it

* Saw.

† Camera Regia; which title, immediately after the Norman Conquest, London began to have.-CAMDEN.