at the Standard in Cornhill, at the Church in Fenchurch Street, near Clothworkers' Hall, in Mincing Lane, at the middle of Mark Lane, and at the Tower Dock." Nearly five-sixths of the whole city were consumed; the ruins covered 436 acres; of six-and-twenty wards fifteen were utterly destroyed, and eight others shattered and half burnt; eighty-nine churches were destroyed, four of the City Gates, Guildhall, many public structures, hospitals, schools, libraries, a great number of stately edifices, 13,200 dwelling houses, and 460 streets. Various estimates have been formed of the pecuniary loss sustained, a pamphlet published in 1667 stating it to be 7,335,000l.; but other accounts give a total of ten millions sterling. It is marvellous that not more than six persons lost their lives in the fire, one of these being a watchmaker of Shoe Lane, "who would not leave his house, which sunk him with the ruins into the cellar, where his bones, with his keys, were found." The loss of life contrasts favourably with that of the fire of 1212, which until Charles II.'s reign was known as the Great Fire of London. The Waverley Chronicle reports that this conflagration broke out in Southwark, when a great part of London in the neighbourhood of the Bridge, with the Southwark Priory, was burnt down. Three thousand bodies, half burned, were found in the river Thames, besides those who perished altogether by the flames. Multitudes of people rushed to the rescue of the inhabitants of houses on the Bridge, and while thus engaged the fire broke out on the north side also, and hemmed them in, making a holocaust of those who were not killed by leaping into the Thames. The next great fire in the city after that of 1666 occurred in 1748, when 200 houses were burnt; but a fire broke out in 1794 at Ratcliffe Cross, by which 630 houses and an East India warehouse were destroyed, the loss being 1,000,000l. One of the greatest fires during the present century was the conflagration in Tooley Street in the year 1861, by which property was destroyed to the extent of half a million sterling. Notwithstanding the ravages of the Great Plague, which destroyed 68,596 people, and the terrible calamity of the Great Fire in the year ensuing, London speedily arose again like a phoenix from its ashes. Though the style of building was vastly improved, unfortunately the old narrow and cramped streets were preserved. But many magnificent mansions were reared in the busy and contracted thoroughfares of the city; for the merchant prince lived where he garnered his wealth. "London was to the Londoner what Athens was to the Athenian of the age of Pericles, what Florence was to the Florentine of the fifteenth century. The citizen was proud of the grandeur of his city, punctilious about her claims to respect, ambitious of her offices, and zealous for her franchises." But almost all the noble families of England had long migrated beyond the walls. "The district where most of their townhouses stood lies between the city and the regions which are considered as fashionable. A few great men still retained their hereditary hotels in the Strand. The stately dwellings on the south and west of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the Piazza of Covent Garden, Southampton Square (which is now called Bloomsbury Square), and King's Square in Soho Fields (which is now called Soho Square), were among the favourite spots. Foreign princes were carried to see Bloomsbury Square as one of the wonders of England. Golden Square, which was in the next generation inhabited by lords and ministers of state, had not yet been begun. Indeed, the only dwellings to be seen on the north of Piccadilly were three or four isolated and almost rural mansions, of which the most celebrated was the costly pile-erected by Clarendon, and nicknamed Dunkirk House. It had been purchased, after its owner's downfall, by the Duke of Albemarle. The Clarendon Hotel and Albemarle Street still preserve the memory of the site." What is now the gayest and most crowded part of Regent street was in the time of Charles II. a complete solitude, where a rambler might sometimes have a shot at a woodcock. General Oglethorpe, who died at a great age in 1785, boasted that he had shot birds here in Queen Anne's reign. The Oxford road on the north ran between hedges, and the occasional residences to be met with were regarded as being quite out of town. The centre of Lincoln's Inn Fields was an open space, where a disorderly rabble congregated every evening, while St. James's Square was a receptacle for all kinds of offal and filth. The houses in London were not numbered, and the walk from Charing Cross to Whitechapel lay through an endless succession of Saracens' Heads, Royal Oaks, Blue Boars, and Golden Lambs, which disappeared when they were no longer required for the direction of the people. In the evening it was not safe to walk abroad in the city. Besides the emptying of pails and the shooting of rubbish from the upper windows upon the passengers beneath, thieves and robbers plied their trade with impunity, and bands of "gentlemen" ruffians paraded the streets, annoying, insulting, and injuring the peaceablydisposed citizens. Until the last year of the reign of Charles II., the streets of London were not lighted. At this time one Edward Heming obtained letters patent, conveying to him, for a term of years, the exclusive right of lighting up London. "He undertook, for a moderate consideration, to place a light before every tenth door, on moonless nights, from Michaelmas to Lady Day, and from six to twelve of the clock." The friends of improvement extolled Heming as one of the greatest benefactors of his species, regarding the inventions of Archimedes as very trifling matters compared with the achievement of the man who had turned the nocturnal shades into noon-day." others, however, who strenuously opposed this innovation, just as in later days (as we are reminded) there were people who opposed vaccination and railways. 66 There were It should not be forgotten-though it is a point which has frequently escaped attention, and is not mentioned by Macaulay and others-that to no single cause can the growth of London be more legitimately assigned than to improved methods of locomotion. London would as yet have occupied a position very inferior to that it now enjoys had its increase in population depended chiefly upon the increase of families resident within its borders. When the journey from distant parts of the country to the metropolis was rendered comparatively easy and inexpensive, people flocked thither, but the influx bore no proportion whatever to the numbers of persons who have migrated to London from the provinces since the introduction of railways. If we glance at the means of locomotion in 1685, we shall appreciate the vast strides that have been made. Hardly a single navigable canal had been projected, and the Marquis of Worcester was suspected of being a madman for having constructed a rude steam-engine, called a fire-work, "which he pronounced to be an admirable and most forcible instrument of propulsion." The highways were in a terrible condition. Pepys and his wife, travelling in their own coach, lost their way between Newbury and Reading. Subsequently they lost their way near Salisbury, and were in danger of having to pass the night on the Plain. Passengers had to swim for their lives when the floods were out between Ware and London. "The great route through Wales to Holyhead was in such a state that, in 1685, a Viceroy, going to Ireland, was five hours in travelling fourteen miles, from Saint Asaph to Conway. Between Conway and Beaumaris he was forced to walk great part of his way; and his lady was carried in a litter. His coach was, with much difficulty, and with the help of many hands, brought after him entire. In general, carriages were taken to pieces at Conway, and borne, on the shoulders of stout Welsh peasants, to the Menai Straits. In some parts of Kent and Sussex none but the strongest horses could, in winter, get through the 'bog,' in which at every step they sank deep. The markets were often inaccessible during several months." The chief cause of the badness of the roads was found in the defective operation of the law. The inhabitants of every parish were bound to repair the highways which passed through it; and, as Lord Macaulay observes, this was especially hard upon the poor parishes. In many instances, in fact, it was a sheer impossibility. The Great North Road traversed very poor and thinly-inhabited districts; but upon these districts chiefly fell the burden of the maintenance of the road, and not upon the wealthy and populous districts at its extremities, viz., London and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Changes were slowly inaugurated, till now Great Britain is intersected in every direction by upwards of thirty thousand miles of good turnpike road. Besides the stage waggons in use in Charles II.'s time, there were horses and coaches for the wealthier classes. The cost of conveying goods was enormous. "From London to Birmingham the charge was 7. a ton; and from London to Exeter 127. a ton. The cost of conveyance amounted to a prohibitory tax on many articles." It was twenty times as great as the charge for conveyance made at the present day. Journeys to London from the country were a very expensive as well as a tedious affair. In 1669 the University of Oxford established a "Flying Coach," whose first journey to London was regarded with great anxiety by the University authorities. At six in the morning on the first day it left All Souls' College, and at seven in the evening the very adventurous gentlemen who travelled by it safely reached their destination in London. "The ordinary day's journey of a flying coach was about fifty miles in the summer; but in the winter, when the ways were bad and the nights long, little more than thirty. The Chester coach, the York coach, and the Exeter coach, generally reached London in four days during the fine season, but at Christmas not till the sixth day." Yet these coaches, which to us are the reverse of “flying," proved a great temptation to people in the country to make the journey to London. In the year 1672, though only six stage coaches were going constantly throughout the country, a curious pamphlet was written by one John Cresset, of the Charter House, in favour of their suppression. Amongst other reasons which the writer gives against their continuance is the extraordinary one following: These stage coaches make gentlemen come up to London upon very small occasion, which otherwise they would not do but upon urgent necessity; nay, the conveniency of the passage makes their wives often come up, who, rather than come such long journeys on horseback, would stay at home. Here, when they come to town, they must presently be in the mode, get fine clothes, go to plays and treats; and by these means get such habit of idleness and love of pleasure that they are uneasy ever after." : It will now be interesting to note with what rapidity the several divisions of the metropolis, which once formed a portion of the quiet forest of Middlesex, have become populated, and the abodes of the teeming millions of the London of the present day. Fitzstephen, from whom we have already quoted, describing the suburbs at the close of the twelfth century, says :- “There are cornfields, pastures, and delectable meadows, intermixed with pleasant streams, on which stands many a mill whose clack is grateful to the ear. Beyond them a forest extends itself, beautified with woods and groves, and full of the lairs and coverts of beasts and game, stags, bucks, boars, and wild bulls." These wild bulls were probably buffaloes, or an animal resembling the beasts of Andalusia, remarks one commentator; but another and more probable supposition is that they were of the same kind as the ancient British race, which Sir Walter Scott tells us in the "Bride of Lammermoor" ranged in the old Caledonian Forest; and of which species herds still remain in the parks of Chartley, in Staffordshire, and Chillingham, in Northumberland. From the spot now busy with the feet of Londoners bent upon commercial enterprises, the warriors of Hastings, Crecy, and Agincourt cut their bows which dealt destruction to the Frenchmen. To us, their successors, it seems impossible to realise that flowers were once plucked from the thickets of the Strand and from the gardens and meadows of St. Pancras. Roger of Wendover states that in the thirteenth century Hampstead Heath was the resort of wolves, and was as dangerous to cross on that account at night as it was for ages afterwards--and in fact almost down to cur own times--from highwaymen. Matthew Paris says that not only did wolves abound on the Heath in his time, but wild boars, deer, and wild bulls, the ancient British cattle; so that neither the wolf's head tax of King Edgar in Wales, nor the mandates of Edward I. in England, had anything like accomplished the extirpation of the wolf in England. Fitzstephen, in his Survey of London so late as 1182, and Juliana Berners still later, in the reign of Henry VI., fifteenth century, assert (the latter in the "Boke of St. Alban's ") that the wolf and wild boar still haunted the forests north of London. At the commencement of the nineteenth century, highway robberies were of tolerably frequent occurrence round and about the Heath. A good story is told of the Sheridans, which illustrates the condition of the Heath in the last century. Tom Sheridan was recommended by his distinguished father (who was tired of his son's extravagance and impecuniosity) to "go and try the trade of highwayman on Hampstead Heath." Tom, who was aware of his father's difficulties in the management of Drury Lane Theatre, replied:-"I have done so, but I made a bad hit; I stopped a caravan full of passengers who assured me they had not a farthing amongst them, for they all belonged to Drury Lane Theatre, and could not get a single penny of their salary!" The River of Wells, which commenced at the foot of the Hampstead Hills, ran between Pond Street and Kentish Town to Pancras, and then by several meanders through Battle Bridge, Black St. Mary's Hall (where also there was a spring), and thence to Turnmill Street, Field Lane, and Holborn Bridge to Fleet Ditch. Of this river, tradition saith, according to Norden, "that it was once navigable, and that lighters and barges used to go up as far as Pancras Church, and that in digging anchors have been found within these two hundred years." Kilburn was quite a solitary place in Henry I.'s time, and old Kilburn Priory was made over to three maids of honour to the Queen. Centuries later, that is in 1685, Enfield, now hardly out of sight of the smoke of the capital, was a region of twenty-five miles in circumference, in which deer, as free as in an American forest, wandered by thousands. The last wild boars, which had been preserved for the royal diversion, and had been allowed to ravage the cultivated lands with their tusks, were slaughtered by the exasperated peasants during the license of the Civil War. The last wolf that roamed this island was slain in Scotland a short time before the close of the reign of Charles II. King Henry VIII. had hunting grounds, where stand now some of the most populous parts of the metropolis. One of his proclamations runs :—“Forasmuch as the King's most royall Matie is much desirous to have the game of hare, partridge, pheasant, and heron, preserved in and about his honour, att his palace of Westminster for his owne disport and pastime; that is to say, from his said palace of Westminster to St. Gyles-in-the-Fields, and from thence to Islington, to our Lady of the Oke, to Highgate, to Hornsey Parke, to Hampstead Heath, and from thence to his said palace of Westminster, to be preserved for his owne disport, pleasure, and recreacion," &c. There were penalties for killing game within these |