river flowed through marsh and virgin forest. On the evershifting distances of London streets which elude definition, and on the suggestive mystery of London skies, Turner's dreams were fed. In his earliest youth it was at Lambeth that he painted the first of his pictures to be hung on the walls of the Academy. It was at Chelsea that he lodged in his old age, in a riverside cottage, from whose roof, or from a wherry, he watched the changes of the heavens, making a spy-glass of his hands. In despite of truth, but in pursuit of beauty, Turner has painted the world with the atmosphere of London.

To turn from the witchery of the skies, it is surely time that a plea was entered for the charm with which the air of London has endued the stonework of our buildings. There are many to whom smoke and grime are always an evil, who wish, perhaps, that our buildings each morning should be sluiced with jets of water, after the Dutch fashion, who would fain scrub St. Paul's. The incomparable Lamb would have none of this: "I love the very smoke of London," he exclaimed. To our statues the grime is fatal, which is no matter for great concern, but in the gradations of light and shade exhibited in the stones of Wren's churches the etcher finds full scope for his art. The Portland stone used in the upper portion of these churches, of a kind never dug now from the quarries, is often bleached to silvery white; especially is this apparent when spire and tower gleam spectral on the night. But even these silvery stones are delicately marked by the hand of time. And beneath each tower what dignity in a world of shadows! There are some so preoccupied with the modern search to reproduce the luminous aspect of a sunlit world as to forget that in shadows there is repose. How full of richness and interest the simple wall may be when stained and coloured by the fallow rains, the

drip of water, the erosion of the air, by all the frescoes of wind and weather. The range of tone in the blacks and grays is unapproached in any building that rejoices under the purer skies of Italy. The effects are more subtle. Ignorance alone could vaunt the colour of our stones above the jewelled beauty of Venetian palaces, or the golden travertine of Greece; but in the half-world of colour, the blacks which are soft as velvet, and the grays which from silver and pearl approach to indigo or russet, London is unrivalled.

Here, even on cloudless days, sunshine is tempered by an invisible canopy of vapours, and for this reason the blue of the sky seems more intimately near than in the South. There is a magic air fertile in illusions. As water will often give a reflection more beautiful than the object, so by this air the mean or squalid is at times transmuted into " something rich and strange," so potent a medium is it for softening, modifying, concealing, for making the values more pronounced. Even in prosaic streets the play of light and shadow upon the roofs and houses will result in a wonderful sky-line, a charming vista. In the old road to Tyburn, from Newgate to the Marble Arch, there is many a pleasing silhouette against the sky of roofs wantonly irregular in style and level, and, in the neighbourhood of the Inns of Court, the countless chimney stacks are picturesque, like a forest of gnarled and twisted branches. That sinister familiar of Paris, Le Stryge, which with lolling tongue leans out from the heights of Notre Dame over the Ile de la cité, looks not on so rich a pasture of huddled roofs and winding river as he who mounts the tower of St. Bride's, or the Monument. The human diversity, the wayward energy of the houses, reflects the passionate life which throbs in the city's arteries. The huge and formless structures, hotels, warehouses,

tenements, can thence be seen only in the mass, redeemed by the saving grace of the atmosphere. The florid Palace of Westminster is by distance chastened to a style more nobly Gothic; the new Law Courts, despite irrelevant arcade and pepper-box, seem no longer such a gallimaufry; and the Tower Bridge, dim and shadowy, is no incongruous mixture of stone and iron, but has become simple, elemental, as befits the great water gate of London. Beyond, in the pool and in the docks, their crowded masts rising above the houses, are the ships; tugs are panting up the river, towing a string of lighters laden with coal or timber; on every wharf the task of unloading proceeds apace, and the file of men that tramp the gangway from the steamer look for all the world like ants laden with eggs. But the eye soon turns from all else to St. Paul's, which from these heights is revealed in the grandeur of its dimensions. In sunlight the soft black shadows upon the dome give to it the fulness of strength, an abiding solidity, while on gray and vaporous days it looms strangely insubstantial, ghostly, islanded in mist, yet always dominant. It is fitting that the centre, to which London points, should be capable of such paradox.

The thought that so much which has delighted the eye has gone or is vanishing is profoundly sad. If London is to have its Méryon, it should be quickly. Sir John Soane, having designed the Bank of England, amused himself with an architectural drawing in which he foretold its appearance when the New Zealander pictured by Macaulay should visit the august ruins of the once Imperial city. He has drawn it with broken columns upreared amid fallen blocks of masonry that are mellowed by the hand of time. Alas, it is not by the slow ravages of time, but at the importunate bidding of commerce that the London we have known disappears. Against this

adversary a Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings is all but powerless. "As with the body's change," so with many a district; the past fades and is obliterated, and a new phase of London grows swiftly to maturity. But though good must pass," better rarely if ever follows. I am tempted to think that the advent of the railways wrought as much havoc as the Great Fire itself. To make way for stations, goods-yards, sidings, and the like, many a quiet, old-world street, and many a church, were swept away, and to the rapacity of the railways there is no end. For the increased traffic, which they fed, broad thoroughfares in central London were demanded, and half the great houses were pulled down. When the coaches no longer held the road, the coaching inns, those fair and spacious hostelries, soon dwindled in number. Scarce one is left, though fragments remain in Aldgate, Southwark, and Holborn. The "Old Bell Inn" in Holborn was a sturdy survival, but it is gone now. In some cases, by the irony of fate, it is a railway company that grants a reprieve, and the galleried courtyard, once the scene of so much gaiety, is used for a little while as a railway stable.

One by one our city churches, the rearguard of our past, are disappearing; in the last generation their destruction has been reckless. Each year now claims its sacrifice; one year it is St. George's, Botolph Lane, the next St. Peter le Poerthe stones are sold, the interments violated, the sites desecrated. If when the churches were destroyed the towers were allowed to stand, a concession that might easily be made, the injury would be less grievous, for the towers and steeples of the city churches were designed by Wren to form a group of acolytes, supporting the central figure of St. Paul's. By their reduction the symmetry of London has been impaired; in particular

the loss is to be deplored of the four steeples of Allhallows, Bread Street, St. Antholin's, Watling Street, St. Bene't, Gracechurch, and St. Michael, Queenhithe. In earlier years reasonable or colourable excuse was given for demolition, as that a church must go in order that the approach to London Bridge might be widened, or that another must be absorbed by the Bank of England lest its tower should give dangerous vantage to a mob. But to-day no valid excuse is offered; such is the greed of commerce that a church in which are enshrined the customs, sentiments, and traditions of a people, must give place to a warehouse or a brewery.

The Inns of Chancery, although but a little while ago they were an integral part of London, are now almost a thing of the past. New Inn, whose hall, with its tiled roof and mullioned windows, looked upon a pleasant garden, and Furnival's Inn, where Dickens lived and wrote, are swept away; the name of Clement's Inn is given to a block of unseemly flats, and of Barnard's Inn the hall alone remains. Danes Inn, an independent body, in whose name was embalmed the memory of the old Danish settlement, has shared the fate of New Inn, to make way for a great thoroughfare. Clifford's Inn has been sold, and its fortunes still hang in the balance. May the Fates be propitious to this "haunt of ancient peace," so that, like Staple Inn, which has fallen into good hands, it may be maintained for many a day to soothe the senses with a tranquil charm. It can scarcely be said that the Inns of Court themselves are safe, when it is remembered how the splendid Gothic gateway of Lincoln's Inn of late so narrowly escaped destruction; and what wanton mischief has been wrought by the restorer in the Middle Temple Church, in the hall of Gray's Inn, and in Lincoln's Inn Chapel, which now stands like a steed with its head

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