have been consulted; these authorities were views as well as maps; for the result of Mr. Newton's labours is a pictorial map, a bird's-eye view, a compromise between a picture and a plan, sufficing to convey a notion of architectural appearance as well as relative position.

८

In laying down this map,' the author states, which purports to represent the metropolis as it stood in the reign of Henry VIII., before the suppression of religious houses, the accurate survey taken by John Roque in the beginning of the last century, and published in twenty-five sheets by Pine and Tierney, has been used as a basis, by the aid of which almost every ancient locality of note may be traced, and in some instances their exact limits determined. In cases where this could not satisfactorily be done, considerable assistance has been derived from the old and rare map of London, by John Ogilvy, gentleman, published in the seventeenth century. The ancient buildings of monastic origin having since the Reformation in great part disappeared, it has been a prominent object of this work to point out as correctly as may be their true situations; and in most instances, if not in all, it is believed that their position, extent, and general appearance at the period assigned to our map are rendered with fidelity.'

The authorities for the general architectural appearance of the buildings represented in this bird's-eye map were, of course, other than the above.

'As an accessory authority for the constructive features of the buildings in general, the original large print by Radulphus Aggas, entitled "Civitas Londinum, anno Dõi MDLX.," has been taken, which, though extremely rude in delineation, and sadly distorted as to proportionate distances, is acknowledged to exhibit, with tolerable accuracy, the principal places existing in and about London in the early part of the reign of Elizabeth. In addition to this the curious and very accurate, though small, representation of London, by Hofnagle, published at Nuremberg, in the year 1572, by Braun and Hogenberguin, has been consulted. Also a manuscript in the Bodleian Library, purporting to be an accurate representation of London, Westminster, and Southwark, as they appeared A. D. 1543, by Anthony Van der Wyngrerde. And, lastly, a plan of London in the British Museum, made by order of government immediately after the Great Fire of 1666, showing the exact sites of all the churches as they stood previous to that calamitous event.'

The map thus produced by an eclectic process from old materials is a valuable adjunct to the histories, chronicles, topographies, and memoirs of those days. It reveals to us not merely the relative localities, but also the architectural appearance of the homes of the great and the temples of the religious -the royal residences at Westminster and Whitehall, the

baronial palaces along the banks of the Thames, the pleasant gardens on the river margin of the White Friars and Black Friars' precincts, the stately Baynard's Castle between Puddle Dock and Paul's Wharf, &c. Then, away from the busy hum of men, in cloistered seclusion and peace, we find the Abbey of Grace in East Smithfield, the Monastery of the Crutched Friars near Tower Hill, St. Katherine's Hospital below the Tower, the Priory of the Holy Trinity near Aldgate, the Holywell Nunnery near Norton Folgate, Bethlehem Hospital at Bishopsgate, the Augustine Friary in the present Austin Friars, the Carthusian Friary, better known in these days as the Charter House, the Clerkenwell Nunnery and the Hospital of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, St. Giles's Hospital in the 'village of St. Giles,' and a number of other religious houses.

So far as the object of the present Article is concerned, Mr. Newton's ingenious and laborious map is valuable in showing how many important buildings, now buried in the very heart of the Metropolis, were in the days of Henry VIII. strictly suburban, either bounded on all sides by fields and gardens, or abutting on one side only on the mass of structures constituting busy London. Adopting the reign of that monarch as a starting point, it will perhaps be found that the simplest mode of tracing the gradual growth of London is by comparing maps published at various intervals during the last three centuries. In the Map of London for the year 1560, re-engraved by Virtue long afterwards, the field-margin round the labyrinth of houses determines the practical limit of the Metropolis. Here, with the love of quaint effect so often exhibited by the old map-engravers, a laundress is seen hanging out clothes on the spot now occupied by the group of houses between the Haymarket and Leicester Square; a lady and gentleman, with a little boy and a little dog, are enjoying the country air in the field called the Long Acre; three laundresses are busily employed in their vocation in the meadows, now densely inhabited but still known as Bunhill Fields; several toxopholites are engaged in archery practice in Spital Fields; while Southwark has its bull-baiting and bear-baiting theatres not far removed from rural walks and shady bowers. And these fields, thus encircling the busy city, are not merely annular green belts, bits of verdure in the midst of houses: they are, in all fair language, open country, suggestive of a pleasant, healthy walk to the distant villages of Stepney, Hoxton, Pancras, Marylebone, or Tyburn. In a Map of Westminster, dated 1610, the green grass begins just beyond the village of Charing or Charing-Cross; insomuch that St. Martin's is

really in the fields.' A Map of Middlesex, of the same date, shows very curiously the absorbent power of the Metropolis; for the isolated villages and hamlets, now included within the limits of London, dot the map as thickly as the never-to-bewholly-discovered planetoids adorn the space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Not only are Kensington, Bayswater, Kilburn, Hampstead, Highgate, Holloway, Kingsland, Hackney, far out in the peaceful country regions; but Clerkenwell and Shoreditch are both clearly suburban; Totten Court is a manor house surrounded by gardens; St. Gylles is unmistakeably in the fields'; and Knightsbridge is represented by a country bridge over a river of respectable dimensions. A map representing the fortifications of London, as ordered by the Parliamentarians in 1642, exhibits a series of bulwarks, hornworks, breast-works, and forts, extending by way of Gravel Lane, Whitechapel, Brick Lane, Shoreditch, St. John Street, the site of the British Museum, St. Giles's Pound-all at that time distinctly beyond the limits of London. The Great Fire in 1666 led to the production of many maps of London, one of which a curiosity in its way was published by De Wit at Amsterdam; it represents London as it appeared immediately after the fire; and is ornamented with a fisherman leaning on an oar, weeping, or rather blubbering, over a weeping family carrying away a cart-load of goods. Many of the maps published soon after the Great Fire showed either the gap made by that dread calamity (from Tower Hill to Fetter Lane, and from Cripplegate to the Thames), or the plans which Wren and Evelyn respectively proposed for the rebuilding.

The maps of the 18th century display, in like manner, the progressive enlargements the Metropolis underwent, both by the spread of bricks and mortar over the green fields, and by the absorption of detached villages within its circumference. In Bowles's Map of Middlesex, published in 1733, Hockesden, Bednall Green, Cambury House, Shakewell, and Maribone,names easily to be recognised under their queer spelling, are still clearly out of town'; Copenhagen House is in existence, widely separated by fields from Battle Bridge. Roque's Map of Middlesex, in 1757, displays a marked improvement: the map is better engraved, and the names more correctly rendered; the New Road from Islington to Paddington is traced out; we detect, under the name of Knotton Barn, the kernel around which has grown the large district of Notting Hill; and the Mother Red Cap' tells of the first slight rudiments of Camden Town. Cary's Map, in 1787, exhibits Paddington as distinct from London, the British

Museum or Montague House as bounded by fields on the north, Islington as almost isolated, and the site of the present Belgravia as the Five Fields; but, on the other hand, Hoxton, Bethnal Green, Stepney, and Battle Bridge, show signs of approaching absorption in the great vortex.

It is not until within the last thirty years that the Map of London has taken those topographical leaps by which its extraordinary dimensions have been at length attained. Even in Cary's Map for 1810, the Edgeware Road remains the western boundary, and the New Road the northern limit of the northwest quarter of the Metropolis; the village of Wesborn or Westborne is far out a-field; the Jew's Harp Tea Gardens occupies a spot within the present limits of the Regent's Park; and White Conduit House has nothing beyond it on the north or west but meadows. From that date down to nearly the end of George the Third's reign, the growth of the Map of London was not marked by especial rapidity; but more recently the rate of increase has been marvellously accelerated. A passage in Rush's 'Residence at the Court of London' shows that the Metropolis was in a stage of rapid growth about the years 1825-30-a growth so marked as to attract the attention of foreigners.

'I went to England again on a short visit in 1829. An interval of but four years had elapsed; yet I was amazed at the increase of London. The Regent's Park, which, when I first knew the west end of the town, disclosed nothing but lawns and fields, was now a city. You saw long rows of lofty buildings, in their outward aspect magnificent. On this whole space was set down a population of probably not less than fifty or sixty thousand souls. Another city, hardly smaller, seemed to have sprung up in the neighbourhood of St. Pancras Church and the London University. Belgrave Square, in an opposite region, broke upon me with like surprise. The road from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich exhibited for several miles compact ranges of new houses. Finchley Common, desolate in 1819, was covered with neat cottages and indeed villages. In whatever direction I went, indications were similar. I say nothing of Carlton Terrace, for Carlton House was gone; or of the street of two miles from that point to Park Crescent, surpassing any other in London, or any that I saw in Europe. To make room for this new and spacious street, old ones had been pulled down, of which no vestige remained. I could scarcely, but for the evidence of the senses, have believed it all. The historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remarks, that the description composed in the Theodosian Age of the many stately mansions in Rome might almost excuse the exaggeration of the poet, that Rome contained a multitude of palaces, and that each palace was equal to a city. Is the British metropolis advancing to this destiny?'

Looking at the maps prefixed to the Post Office Directory for 1855 and 1856, we obtain ample evidence of the wideness. of scope now deemed necessary by Directory-makers in the acceptation of the word London.' The map for the earlier of these two years comprises an enormous rectangle, eight miles and a quarter long from east to west, and five miles broad from north to south, - from Queen's Road Kensington, to Mare's ship-yard at Blackwall; from Kingsland in the north to Peckham Grove in the south. Here are, in short, fortyone square miles of area more or less packed with human beings, although the City of London' proper scarcely occupies more than one square mile; the map includes between forty and fifty villages and hamlets, fringes to the Metropolis, but in fact belonging to it a progeny of some four dozen children, all devoured by the parent. In the following year, however, a still wider area was included in the map of all-absorbent London; the rectangle is now no less than ten miles from east to west, by nine from north to south. Hammersmith to Victoria Docks, Highgate to Dulwich - covering 90 square

miles!

6

Spreading far and wide in every direction, increasing every year the length and breadth of its rectangle, intersected by tens of thousands of streets and lanes-it is little matter for wonder that London is a labyrinth to strangers, a maze in which they greatly need the aid of a clue. It may be very well to live in King Street, London; but what if the locality be undetermined, and what if there be twenty King Streets, which is now the case? Map-makers have not forgotten the troubles of map-explorers in this particular. In an old map without date, but apparently published about two centuries ago, there is a marginal list of 170 streets and lanes, headed thus: The 'Countryman's or Stranger's Ready Helpe, in his finding out of Streets, Lanes, or Places in London; they being alphabetically 'placed with figures directing to them where they are in the Mappe; so that they may see where any Streete is, and 'walke to them without further trouble.' Such a plan as this has been adopted down to the present time in many a 'Stranger's Guide': the map being divided into squares, of a quarter or half a mile on each side, and each square inscribed with a number corresponding to a marginal list of principal streets or buildings.

One of the most extraordinary maps of London ever produced was appended, in 1846, to the Report of the Commissioners on Metropolitan Railway Termini. London was at that time inundated with schemes for connecting the lines