THE reader need not fear that he will be led into a dissertation on the architectural excellences or enormities of our public buildings; these shall be left aside, and, save as it occurs incidentally, architecture shall not be so much as mentioned in what follows. There are many books treating of our great national buildings, and therein may be found details that do not lie within the scope of our present discursive narrative.

The two great Churches of St. Paul and St. Peter are of course the two buildings that stand out pre-eminently in London, by reason of their tradition of antiquity and their sacred character; of the two the Abbey comes in for the largest share of attention from foreigners and visitors. A stranger able to see but one would undoubtedly choose the Abbey, because in many points it has the advantage of St. Paul's; the points easily noticeable are the fact that it is the crowning-place of our sovereigns, and connected with all the State pageantry of these occasions; that it is a much older building than St. Paul's; and that it has always been

The coronations make a magnificent record: a procession of kings from to ., with every variation of dress and detail, but always the same great ceremony, a tradition momentous enough to throw a feeling of solemnity over the most flippant mind.

The principal personages who took part in these coronation ceremonies no doubt each seemed final unto themselves, the embodiment of the present, and had the idea firmly fixed in their minds that now had arrived the great event for which time had been hastening onward, now was a ceremony eclipsing all that had yet been.

From the time when the monks lived on the island of brambles but slightly above the level of the water and easily overflowed, hard by the ford at which the pilgrims and the travellers from north and south crossed the river, before even the building of , the ground whereon the Abbey stands has been sacred ground. Thus the second point is conceded; as a building also we may grant it to be intrinsically more interesting than St. Paul's by yielding to it the palm in age.

. did his share : in the reign of Henry VII. was built the magnificent chapel still known by his name, and Wren's two Western Towers complete the architectural cycle.

On the third count St. Paul's yields again, for though there are names whose glory is second to none buried there, yet is in a peculiar sense the National Valhalla, the Hall of Heroes, and her aisles are crowded thickly with notable names as well as those considerably less notable, and but for their presence here already forgotten. Among Kings and Queens, this is the burialplace of; of the I., III., and VI. Edwards; of .; of Henry V., VII., and VIII.; both the .; .; the two Queen Marys and their unhappy sister of Scotland; and Anne, both remembered with love and gratitude though they were the antithesis in character; .; and George II. Of statesmen, soldiers, poets, and authors; of artists, historians, and men of science, the names are legion; were to have no other title to our love and veneration than these mighty names of the past, it would still occupy a high place. The very air is thick with memories; it is impossible for the eye to rest anywhere without encountering

The reason for this is difficult to find, but shall be entered upon presently. Before leaving it is well to notice its external beauties, and the points of view from which it can best be seen. Coming up Victoria Street on a night when the moon is high overhead, the ghostly and glorious outlines of Wren's two Western Towers can be seen at their best, with all their beautiful stonework, their pinnacles and niches traced as in ivory.

A view less known and full of detail is that from the front of the House of Lords, where every fretted pinnacle of Henry VII.'s chapel is shown in relief, where the platform for the intended spire is full in view and many an angle and turret, and where the white outlines of St. Margaret's are in the background. This is perhaps the finest sight of all. From the river again, where those two fretted towers rise grandly, and the Abbey seems to crouch like a lion behind the Houses of Parliament, it is beautiful also; at every point, down every vista, something may be seen that cannot be attained in any other way. For dignity the ancient Abbey is unapproachable, it needs no spire to call attention to its merits; though it is long-backed, somewhat squat in its dimensions, unequal in its parts, it bears in every line the impress of its growth throughout the ages.

The services in , beautiful as they are, lack something; it may be that the monuments piled in every available space, or the dust of ages lying thickly, deaden and muffle the sound of sweet singing; it may be the peculiar construction of the interior, where the transepts are occupied by the worshippers, who thus sit across the cathedral, and do not see the long nave; or the feeling of having the choir on the wrong side; from one or other of these causes, or all combined, there is never the perfect satisfaction about a service in that there is in St. Paul's.

Who that has sat beneath St. Paul's mighty dome and heard the grand hymn-

0 God, our help in ages past,

The present cathedral is due to Wren, who-though to strengthen the foundations he altered the axis of the church-built on the site of the old cathedral, first founded, according to Bede, in 604. There are no remnants of Old St. Paul's except some monuments and the foundations of the Chapter House, uncovered on the south side.

The Sunday afternoon services, as at present held, bear witness that faith is not dead among us. There, gathered together, Sunday by Sunday, may be found a great crowd of all ages and both sexes, mostly of the middle classes, the comfortably off, comfortably clad people, who keep up a tradition of honest living and hard work, with respectability among us. It is a wonderful sight: the grey distances, the dimness of the towering dome, the long-drawn aisles, and the crowd soberly dressed in black, and brown and dingy colours; a crowd reverent, attentive, joining a service that for singing and music can hardly be surpassed. The boys' voices of St. Paul's are well known for their beauty; wandering down the narrow streets of the neighbourhood on a week day you may chance to hear a song sweeter than any lark's, a boy's clear treble, rising higher and higher, until you catch your breath to listen as the fresh young voice goes up, up, lending wings to the soul; and suddenly with its cessation you come back into a very work-a-day world, a world of hurrying people, of huge carts, of crowded omnibuses,

To return to the congregation, why is it that the commonplace crowd appeals to us so ? Is it because of the love of humanity that beats in our veins ? Is it because we feel that here, in the mass of men and women, are the characteristics to which none of us are strangers, and that, therefore, if these characteristics could by a miracle become visible, and the excrescences of personal idiosyncrasies be taken away, the remnant would be those feelings and qualities common to all ? In fact that we should see humanity in the abstract? It is difficult to express the idea in words, but to those who feel this responsive beat St. Paul's appeals with force. It utters the voiceless cry of those who cannot speak for themselves; it embodies the national ideals. It is the uplifting of those who toil and those who think. The same crowd that gathers in St. Paul's on a Sunday afternoon may be seen any day in the Underground trains about six o'clock, men and women soberly dressed, hard working, keenly alive; intelligent men and women who have opinions and character, who are selfish, imperfect, grasping, and unclean, but who yet have ideals, and with more or less ardour strive to live up to them; who are rarely destitute of self-respect and independence; who form the large majority of Londoners, outnumbering all other classes by ten to one, and who

But we have gone far from St. Paul's. Of its past there are two pictures on which I like to dwell. One is Paul's Cross, with its eager fanatics preaching to an excited crowd, to those who held their religion dear enough to go to the stake and brave the fire for it.

From the time when jousts and tournaments were held in Smithfield, and even hard by in Chepe itself, to the time when first one doctrine and then another

We have several prints of Paul's Cross, one very fine, in which the old cathedral is shown in the background with its flying buttresses and square tower, shorn of the spire, which was burnt in . Against the wall is a sort of grand stand or canopy, where King James I., his Queen, and his son Charles are seated. In the foreground are many people decorously sitting in rows, while a few gallants in cloaks loiter about behind them; one man whips a dog that makes his presence too

In the time of the Fire all the booksellers of Paternoster Row hastened to place their stores in St. Paul's for safe custody, but the stores were burnt with the cathedral. Of all glimpses of St. Paul's, that where it comes suddenly upon you as you pass westward up Cheapside, and the towering dome appears unexpectedly high overhead above the green trees, where the tones of the building run the gamut from indigo to ash-grey, is the most striking. A much better known but less striking view is that of the approach by Fleet Street, where the height of the dome is measured by the pointed spire of St. Dunstan's.

We have lingered long enough over the two great churches, and must note, even if only to mention them, other buildings. Of these there is one other church that every Londoner should know, St. Bartholomew's the Great, hard by Smithfield, where Norman work is to be seen in its full beauty. This church is only a fragment, the choir, in fact, of the old Priory Church of St. Bartholomew built in . Across the water is another priory church, that of St. Mary Overies, now known as St. Saviour's, and here some remnants of the earliest building may be seen, though a great deal of the fabric is modern.

Of entirely new ecclesiastical buildings the magnificent Roman Catholic cathedral in is a striking example; the style Byzantine, carried out in red brick, is alien to the spirit of the Londoner, as is

Kensington Palace speaks still more loudly of the

Far beyond Kensington, on the outskirts of the London that now is, lies the Palace of Fulham, the official residence of the Bishops of London. Situated as it is, easy transit by water was first among its advantages, and the older bishops in their splendid barges passed up and down the river in the ordinary course of the day's work, for long and dangerous country roads, boggy and miry and " infested by footpads," lay between them and the old Cities of London and . Even so late as the eighteenth century, the Earl of

From Fulham to Lambeth we may go bywater, though unless we have a private steam-launch or boat we shall not in these days, these boasted days, find so much as a wherry to take us there. It is down stream, however,

Lambeth is a monument of venerable dignity and far less known than it should be, because, though easily accessible, it stands upon what to London, in general, is the wrong side of the water. It has been the dwelling of the archbishops since the days of Archbishop Fitzwalter in , who proposed at first to found here a college for canons, but being opposed by the Pope, founded a town-house for the See of Canterbury instead. The great gateway at Lambeth is the finest of those remaining from the Tudor period, it is bold and high with battlements and towers, red brick and white stone being the materials used. The part of the palace used by the archbishops for their living-house dates only from the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Lollards' Tower is of grey stone and abuts from the chapel. It had formerly an image of St. Thomas %agrave; Becket in the niche in its walls, to which the watermen of former days would touch their caps in passing. The crypt in the chapel is supposed to be one of the oldest parts, dating from the original building by Fitzwalter. During the time of the Commonwealth the soldiers, out of hatred for Laud, broke into the chapel and destroyed the stained-glass windows, and subsequently the palace was used as a prison, as it had been frequentlyused before; later still it was sold, and the chapel for the time turned into a dancing-room. Such was the reign of the godly Cromwell. It was afterwards restored and rebuilt.

Of the vanished palaces of and

When the first royal palace of was built we have no record, but that there was a royal residence here in the time of . is stated by Lysons. The best-known view is that of "Placentia," the palace of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, to whom the land had been granted by Henry VI., and this, though altered and having its front rebuilt by succeeding sovereigns, became a royal palace after Duke Humphrey's death. Henry VIII. was born at and was very fond of residing here. Here were born also Mary and , and here died the poor little King . The glory of reached its height in the reign of Queen , who gave splendid entertainments at the palace, and occupied it in preference to any of her other residences. Charles II. ordered it to be taken down, and began rebuilding, though lack of funds caused the work soon to cease. Queen Mary II., inspired by the example of , made it one of her dearest wishes to see a fine home for seamen built on the site of the ancient palace, and after her death her husband carried out her wishes, but the seamen ceased to live within the building in , when the scheme was changed, and the pensioners

The fine frontage and the domes of Wren's building are well seen from the river, and the great painted hall, decorated by Thornhill, attracts many visitors. Wren's design was given freely as a magnificent contribution to the great scheme. Though retains some parts of Charles II.'s work and that of other sovereigns, it has none of the real flavour of antiquity; it is splendid, but romance seems to have departed from it, and it does not kindle feelings of enthusiasm.

Of the great public buildings not yet described the first in rank is of course the Tower. The arrangements have been so much improved of late years that it is now quite possible for the visitor to attain some idea of the plan of a first-rate medieval fortress. It is still a barrack and a store for artillery, but all the older parts are open to view, and we wander as we will over the site of the palace and its garden, or through the grim prison-like passages and halls of the keep and its chapel. We note that, till the modern doorways were made, the entrance must have been by a ladder, and what look like dungeons were the royal apartments of the Conqueror and his family. The inscriptions in some of the flanking towers are of a single period, but the Tower as a prison is only one of the three aspects in which the building should be studied. When we know it as a palace, as a fortress, and as a prison, we are presented with its modern phase and find it a most

The grey walls of the turreted White Tower peep over the brown bricks and fixed walls of the Lieutenant's lodging, and in front is the fresh green of a strip of vivid grass.

Go over the drawbridge, and pass under the portcullis of Bloody Tower-which deserves its name if ever a place did so-and seated on Tower Green wait until the spirit of the place has enfolded you. Apart from its historical interest, which is of course paramount, there is another interest that appeals with potency to

In the beautiful Chapel of St. Peter to the north, every stone in the chancel and aisle covers the dust of some murdered man or woman. As Macaulay says, "there is no sadder spot on earth than this little cemetery." Here are buried two queens, Anne Boleyn and Katharine Howard; Lady Jane Grey, who, from the range of building to the south of the Beauchamp Tower, saw her husband's headless body brought back in a cart; Devereux, Earl of Essex; Margaret, Countess of Salisbury. All these were executed on Tower Green on the railed-in space before us, then covered with green grass, now paved with rough cobble stones and gently shaded by young planes. In the chapel also lie the Duke of Monmouth and the Scots Lords, brought here from Tower Hill. As Stow quaintly wrote, in the days when the Earl of Essex, the last of the six persons beheaded in the Tower from

Modern barracks occupy part of the space within the walls, and in the centre rises sternly and splendidly the White Tower. Its facings of Portland stone, due to Wren, have added to its appearance, so that we do not grumble at the change; the interior is as grim and gloomy as in the days when it was first built as a house of defence and a strong tower. The narrow, winding staircase connecting battlements through many stories to vast vaults underground for storage; the well for water; and the secret access to the moat, all prove it capable of being held without difficulty by those besieged, and the walls, thirty feet thick in parts, promised ill for the success of any besiegers that should surmount the moat and wall outside to attack it at close quarters.

St. John's beautiful Norman chapel, with its double crypts; and the airless, lightless cells-one well named with a strange, jesting humour, " Little Ease "-though slightly changed in small details still carry one's mind back through the centuries.

What is supposed to be part of the old Roman City wall stands near the White Tower, and from here a fine view of the Tower Bridge gives one of those peeps which are found in abundance about the Tower. Its charm lies in its heterogeneity, its unexpectedness, its mixture of styles, its marks of growth; he who would

After the Tower all other buildings seem small and uninteresting, yet the Guildhall, which has existed since the earliest corporate existence of London, has a dignity of its own, in spite of what Mr. Wheatley calls the " mongrel substitute" of the frontage put up in . This is the only part of the building generally seen, and is far from lacking beauty, with its delightful irregularity of design and the whiteness of its Portland stone. The walls of the great Hall date from the rebuilding of , and the roof, a modern addition but of oak in the hammer-beam style, cost £100,000. The crypt is probably the part least seen, and yet, from an architectural point of view, it is infinitely the most interesting. It dates from also, and from each pillar spring sixteen ribs to form the groins, a curious and almost unique design. It has been repaired, and is in good preservation. This was not always a crypt, but was once upon the street level, as the windows now blocked up tell. The pavement outside is ten feet or more above it now, for the same reason that we found in Bow Church. The Guildhall has many memories, its courts, its City banquets, and ceremonies being mingled with scenes of history, of which the most memorable is the trial of Lady Jane Grey. The Art Gallery, the Museum, and the Library are all well known both to strangers and citizens.

The Royal Exchange, the Bank, and the Mansion House serve to make a group, which if not beautiful

Not far off is , to be mentioned again in connection with . It is the only ancient gate left standing across a street in London. It formed the entrance to the priory of St. John of Jerusalem, and the offices of the re-established Order of the same name are here to-day.

Among other public buildings to be mentioned are the Houses of Parliament, forming a well-known river view,-I mean the view from the east, where the bridge draws a line across the front, and the towers rise behind a foreground of barges and rippling water; and

Besides the crypt of St. Stephen's the hall is the only part of the ancient palace left.

Of galleries and museums in London the less said

What the new South Kensington Museum will be remains to be seen as it sheds its scaffolding poles; it is to be hoped that it will in some degree neutralise the effect of the hideous Noah's Ark next to it. The Imperial Institute, lamentably as it has failed in the purpose for which it was intended, is externally by far the most graceful and harmonious building in this quarter.

But time fails us, of Somerset House, of Burlington House, of the Tate Gallery, of all Wren's churches, we would fain talk by the hour, yet such discourse might fail to be profitable, and could not altogether fail of being wearisome. We forbear, and leave this chapter, with the impressions already gained of the Houses of Parliament outlined against a glowing, smoky, sunset sky; of the stately dome of St. Paul's rising high above the roofs and line of quivering planes; of ancient red-brick, stonequoined gateways; and of the mighty Tower, concrete English History.