duction of vaccination and railroads, and as strenuously as the fools of an age anterior to the dawn of history doubtless opposed the introduction of the plow and of alphabetical writing."

Dr. Johnson, who had violent prejudices against many other things, is said to have predicted the lighting of London by gas. One evening, from the window of his house in Bolt Court, he observed the parish lamplighter ascend a ladder to light one of the public lanterns. The man had scarcely half way descended when the flame expired. Quickly returning, he lifted the cover partially, and thrust the end of his torch beneath it: the flame was instantly communicated to the wick by the vapor, which suddenly ignited. "Ah," exclaimed the doctor, "one of these days the streets of London will be lighted with smoke!"

We have now seen how Sir Hugh Middleton saved the housewife the trouble of going with her bucket to the nearest stream when she wanted water, and provided her with an inexhaustible flow in her own kitchen; how the refuse of the thousands of houses is swiftly carried off instead of being allowed to breed disease by accumulation; how lurking thieves and hidden pitfalls were defeated by the glimmer of lamps, which have in creased in number, until now, when London is seen from an eminence on a clear night, it seems like a garden sown with yellow flowers; and how the feeble old Dogberrys of the past have been replaced by wideawake and brawny policemen, who keep the rogues well under hand. We have yet to speak of the introduction of the means provided for "getting about."

In olden times there were no public conveyances. The better class of citizens rode to church, or to make calls, on horses, and at a later period they had their own car riages. On great occasions there were often as many people in the saddle as a-foot, and the equestrian display was a fine one; no less than six thousand horsemen, for instance, having attended the coronation of Henry IV. The chroniclers have painted such celebrations for us in vivid colors.

They show us the entry into London of the conqueror of Agincourt, and the attendant splendors-the conduits flowing with wine, the artificial trees and flowers, the maidens. playing music, the wooden houses draped with gay tapestries, and the inmates sitting in their most costly dresses on the balconies. These magnificent equestrian spectacles were familiar to the citizens from the earliest times. It is not easy to think of London, whose murmur can now be heard miles away, without the sound of wheels other than those of the cart dragging through the ruts with its load of firewood or beer or wool. But the city had no coaches until late in the reign of Elizabeth; and they can scarcely be said to have come into general use until the reign of James.

Their use is noticed by Stow as follows: "In the year 1564 Guilliam Boonen, a Dutchman, became the queen's coachman, and was the first that brought the use of coaches into England. After a while, divers great ladies, with as great jealousy of the queen's displeasure, made them coaches, and rid up and down the countries in them, to the great admiration of all the beholders; but then by little and little they grew usual among the nobility and others of sort, and in twenty years became a great trade of coach-making."

The new vehicles increased in number despite the condition of the roads. One writer says: "It is a most uneasy kind of passage, in coaches on the paved streets of London, wherein men and women are so tost, tumbled, jumbled, and rumbled." The drivers of carts took a malicious pleasure in obstructing the coaches, moreover, and it was said that six nobles often had to give precedence to six barrels of beer.

In 1634 a stand of hackney coaches was provided for the use of any persons who wished to hire them, and the fact was thus recorded: "I cannot omit to mention any new thing that comes up among us, though never so trivial. Here is one Captain Baily; he hath been a sea captain, but now lives on the land, about this city, where he tries experiments. He hath erected, according to his ability, some four hackney

coaches, put his men in livery, and appointed them to stand at the Maypole in the Strand, giving them instructions at what rate to carry men into several parts of the town, where all day they may be had. Other hackney men seeing this way, they flocked to the same place, and perform their journeys at the same rate. So that sometimes there is twenty of them together, which disperse up and down, that they and others are to be had everywhere, as watermen are to be had by the waterside. Everybody is much pleased with it; for, whereas before coaches could not be had but at great rates, now a man may have one much cheaper."

There was some opposition between the coaches and the sedan chairs, and for a long time the superiority of one over the other was a matter of dispute.

The river, winding through the city, was as great a highway as any street; and, especially between London and Westminster, innumerable row-boats passed to and fro, conveying passengers either on pleasure or business.

The row-boats are superseded now by a fleet of steamers, which call at many landings on both sides of the river, and convey passengers for less than one cent a mile; while the hackney coaches and sedan chairs are replaced by over three thousand cabs, twelve hundred omnibuses, a large number of street-cars, and the trains of the underground railway.

The charge of the cabs is twenty-five cents for two miles or less, and half as much again for each additional mile. The great number of them, and the frequency with which all classes use them day and night, is one of the features of the London streets. But more convenient to people traveling east and west than all other conveyances are the trains of the underground railway.

To a thoughtful person, the crowded surface of London is always impressive. There are scarcely any gaps without an urgent crowd of pedestrians and vehicles; everything seems to be in motion, the whole population to be in the streets, and each individual in a hurry. One is thrilled by the

activity--the surges of human life that roll noisily through the streets, "from eternity onward to eternity." Yet here and there we come upon a grating within some railings, and an upward rush of steam and a rumble from below shows us that, crowded as the surface is with its thousands of cabs and omnibuses, there is a lower level, upon which another part of the immense population is traveling by a conveyance more rapid than either cabs or omnibuses-under houses, and under a vast gridiron of sewers, water pipes, gas pipes, pneumatic tubes, and subterranean telegraph wires. Here and there we see one of the stations, and, descending far below the level of the street, we reach an atmosphere of smoke and steam in a great underground vault, with trains rapidly passing through in both directions. both ends of the vault is a tunnel with a few lights glimmering in it. A bell tinkles, and a lamp appears in the distance; then, out of the tunnel comes a train; passengers alight quickly, and as quickly embark, and the train vanishes into the continuation of the tunnel.

The vault is an underground station, and similar ones may be found about three-quarters of a mile apart, all along the line.

Let us enter that at the Mansion House, which is near the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England-at the very core of mercantile London. After buying our tickets, we board a train going west. All the cars are lighted with gas, and it is necessary that they should be, as the tunnel itself is dark. The motion of the train is easy, but the atmosphere is damp and smoky; a gentle oscillation is all that tells us we are moving. Almost before we have settled ourselves in our seats we re-enter the twilight at the station at Blackfriars, nearly a mile from where we started; and the historic name marches a varied procession out of our memories. At Blackfriars was the monastery which gave the place its name; and there, too, was the theater of which Shakspere was an owner, and at which some of his plays were first produced. St. Paul's Cathedral, Newgate Prison, St. Bartholomew's Hospital, the

Charterhouse School, and Ludgate Hill are all within easy distance; and not a stone'sthrow from the station is the office of the London "Times," the source of a power only inferior to that of the Legislative Palace at Westminster.

But in much less time than we can write the names of these places, the train is off again, and the station lights are vanished. Perhaps three minutes are spent, and then there is a stop at which the conductor, or guard, as he is designated in England, calls "Temple! Temple!"—another name which conjures up visions of many periods of Eng. lish history, for here, indeed, is the sanctuary from which the Knights Templar went to the Crusades. Since then it has been the ancestral home of lawyers and authors, and associated with it is a long roll of illustrious names: Beaumont, Cowper, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Clarendon, Wycherley, Congreve, Edmund Burke, Sheridan, Goldsmith, and Thackeray. Temple Bar stood close by until 1875, separating the Strand from Fleet Street; and just over the heads of the passengers in the train are the lovely Temple gardens, rich with flowers which thrive despite the London smoke.

We are struck by the expedition shown in starting the train. The passengers, as well as the officials, seem anxious that there shall be as little delay as possible, and those about to alight are ready to step out the moment the train comes to a standstill, while those who are about to embark quickly take their places. The Temple is left behind while we are in the middle of our reflections, and in a few seconds more we reach Charing Cross.

"I talked," says Boswell, "of the cheerfulness of Fleet Street, owing to the quick succession of people which we see passing through it." "Why, sir," replied Dr. Johnson, "Fleet Street has a very animated appearance, but I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross."

So it is. Though the Bank is at the core of the mercantile half of the city, Charing Cross is the center of the rest of London. Here the Strand ends, and Pall Mall with

its magnificent club-houses is across the way. Here also is Trafalgar Square, with Landseer's lions, the Nelson monument, and the National Gallery, wherein is stored the finest collection of pictures in the United Kingdom.

Again our reveries are interrupted by the starting of the train, and in a few seconds more we are at Westminster, the site of a famous abbey, the Houses of Parliament, and the hall which was the palace of the early kings. We have touched at so many interesting places, and have looked so far back into history, that we seem to have made a long journey, but we have only been in the train fifteen minutes.

The underground railway is undoubtedly one of the greatest conveniences of London. It encircles the metropolis and connects with all the main railway stations, except Waterloo. Hosts of objections were raised to it when it was first proposed, and it was prophesied that all manner of evils would arise from it. It was said, even by engineers, that the tunnel would fall in from the mere weight of the traffic in the streets above, and that the adjacent houses would be not only shaken to their foundations by the engines, but that the families in them would be poisoned by the sulphurous exhalations of the fuel. After years of opposition, the work was begun in 1860, and the first section, between Paddington and Farringdon Street, was opened on January 10th, 1863. So great was its success from the very day of its opening, that, in the next session of Parliament, there was such an influx of bills for the proposed formation of railway lines in connection with it, that nearly one-half of the city would have been demolished had all the plans been carried out, and almost every open space occupied by some terminus with its screaming and hissing locomotives. Many of those plans were defeated, but every year some extension is made to the underground lines, which reach out as far as Richmond and Harrow.

Suppose that, after alighting from the underground line, at Westminster, we walk a few steps to the pier of the river steamers, and take one of them down as far as St.

We have said that London has had no Haussmann to untie the knots in its ancient thoroughfares and give it an entirely new dress, as in the boulevards of Paris. But

it has undergone many great changes during recent years, and it is still in an epoch of transition. Smoked and smoky as it is, with its tangled streets, and its somber buildings which wear perpetual mourning, the person visiting it for the first time is probably more impressed by the extent to which it has been modernized than by its monuments of antiquity. Old London has not such a new dress as Paris; but, though not quite á la mode, the dame has many new ribbons fastened to her old-fashioned gown. Cheapside is American in its freshness of architecture. Scarcely one of the old buildings remains upon it, and in their place are brilliant shops with acres of plateglass in their windows; insurance offices of carved stone and polished granite; modern restaurants, with Chippendale furniture, mottoes in tiles, and ecclesiastical windows. It is like a section of Broadway; and, but for the omnibuses and the hansom cabs, one might suppose himself to be in that renowned thoroughfare of the New World, instead of in a historic street of London, which was the central stage of the pageantry of old, and the point where the commerce of Plantagenet times was concentrated. Even in the Strand and Fleet Street, where a few of the houses date back to the time of the Stuarts, and many of them are little altered from what they were in the days of Queen Anne, great showy buildings, which

A complete change has been made along. the river-front from Blackfriars to Westminster, where a broad belt of mud and shallow water has been reclaimed and transformed into the Victoria Embankment; a superb drive and promenade, with a massive granite balustrade, flourishing trees, well-stocked and well-tended gardens, statues, and landings for the small steamers plying above London Bridge, below which the larger shipping is confined. Cleopatra's Needle, a companion to that in Central Park, stands at the foot of Salisbury Street; and among the finer buildings which front on the Embankment are several fashionable hotels, the Temple, Adelphi Terrace (a neighborhood of literary clubs and literary lodgings), and St. Stephens Club, where the leading Conservatives meet to pour forth, even over their dinner or supper, the gall which the Liberals have excited in them. Close by the latter building, the Embankment ends at the Houses of Parliament, behind which the towers of Westminster Abbey are first visible.

It is interesting, in passing along this fine promenade, to think of the river-front as it was before the Embankment was built. At one time, the palaces of the nobility whose names and titles are given to the neighboring streets-Essex, Buckingham, Somerset, Surrey, Norfolk, York, and Arundel-stood along the Strand, with gardens sloping down to the water, where the inmates could take boats. There is record of a golden day when the water of the Thames was so pure that trout lived in it, and anglers could be seen fishing on the banks. Nothing of the palaces remain, save the beautiful water-gate through which the gay company of York House stepped on board the tapestried

barges which bore them to Westminster or the city. Somerset House is only a name given to the present structure, because the latter occupies the site of the old one.

After these stately homes disappeared, the river-front seems to have fallen into decay, and rookeries shivered in the wind along the oozy borders. It was a dark place, where crime sought a hiding-place and poverty a shelter. Many a piteous sob might have been heard under the dark arches of Waterloo Bridge. Many a hideous crime remained undetected, while its perpetrators concealed themselves in the riverside shanties.

The work of reclamation was begun in February, 1864, and the Embankment was opened in July, 1870. The approaches to it are insufficient at present; but when these are increased, it will become one of the most crowded, as it is now the most commodious, of London streets.

On the Surrey side of the river is another embankment, named after the queen's late husband, Prince Albert, and among the buildings abutting on it is one of the largest of the many London charities-St. Thomas's Hospital, which consists of no less than eight distinct buildings, or pavilions, seventeen hundred feet in length, and two hundred and fifty feet in depth. It is built of brick, with stone facings, and cost nearly $2,500,000. Just opposite to it, on the Middlesex side of the river, are the Parliament buildings; and few views in London are more impressive than that from Westminster Bridge, which brings in both the hospital and the legislative palace, with the Victoria Embankment reaching from it.

Here the prelate lived in more than royal magnificence, with a household of eight hundred persons, and entertained the king, who took "great comfort" from the hospitality with which he was received. Afterwards, when Wolsey was in disgrace, the king himself took possession of Whitehall. He married Anne Boleyn there, and there "bluff King Hal" ended his life of crime on January 28th, 1546.

It was also from Whitehall that Queen Mary went forth to be crowned, and thence Elizabeth was sent to the tower on a wrongful accusation of complicity in Sir Thomas Wyatt's conspiracy. In her turn, Elizabeth set out from Whitehall to receive the crown, and in her reign the palace was the scene of many brilliant masques and tournaments. In the grounds Lord Monteagle first told the Earl of Salisbury of the gunpowder plot; and hither Guy Fawkes was dragged from the cellar of the House of Lords into the presence of King James I.

"What," said one of the Scottish courtiers, "did you intend to do with so many barrels of gunpowder ?"

"I intended, for one thing," brusquely said the conspirator, "to blow all Scotchmen back into Scotland."

Whitehall attained its greatest splendor in the reign of Charles I., when eighty-six tables were set at each meal, the king little dreaming that the walls which saw these festivities would, at a later period, witness his execution. Oliver Cromwell was the next tenant, and John Milton occupied the room as his Latin secretary. The great Protector died in the palace, and was succeeded in the occupation of it by Richard Cromwell. Then came Charles II., with his dissolute companions; and, at his death, James II. made Whitehall his principal residence. In the reign of William III. the palace was almost totally destroyed by fire, and all that now remains of it is the banqueting hall from which Charles I. passed to his execution.