OLD AND NEW LONDON

The cover (of part 23)
The source Google book is here

CHAPTER XXXVII.
THE RIVER THAMES.

Large, gentle, deep, majestic King of Floods.

Thomson.

The Pool ; Importance of the Thames in the Olden Time; King James and the Corporation of London; Scenery of the Thames from London Bridge to Westminster; The "Folly"; A Chinese Junk; The Ancient Church of St. Mary the Virgin; Lilly, the Astrologer; The Thames Police; The Royal Humane Society's Reception room; Waterloo Bridge; The Last of the Savoy Palace; Carlisle House; The Adelphi Terrace; Rousseau and Garrick; Old Hungerford Bridge; Hungerford Stairs; Warren's Blacking Warehouse and Charles Dickens ; The Thames Swimming Baths; Whitehall Stairs; Cowley's Funeral; Westminster Bridge; Wordsworth's Sonnet on the Scene from the Bridge at Sunrise.

We do not intend in this chapter to write a history of the Thames from its source to the sea; much less to become the biographer of the rivers that fall into it: that work has been already done by Dr. Charles Mackay, in his pleasant and chatty book, "The Thames and its Tributaries". It is our business and duty to show ourselves, like Theodore Hook, "familiar with the Thames from London Bridge up to Eel Pie Island" — perhaps even a little farther.
Our discourse, therefore, will be only of the Thames at and near London;and for the present we shall keep "above bridge", simply contenting ourselves with the remark that, if the visitor from foreign lands would wish to form an adequate idea of the mercantile and commercial wealth of our great metropolis, he had better enter London not by the South Eastern or the Chatham and Dover Railways, but by the silent highway of that noble river of which Englishmen are so proud.
"The congregation of men, ships, and commerce of all nations in the 'Pool'; the din, the duskiness, the discord of order, activity, and industry, is finer,"
writes the author of "Babylon the Great",
"than a bird's eye view of London from the hills on the north or south, or than the royal gardens, the parks, and the palaces, that first present themselves to a stranger coming from the west."
This is indeed old Father Thames, in the overwhelming wonders of his wealth;and the ships and the warehouses that we see contain the stimulus and the reward of those men who have made England the queen and London the jewel of the world.
Truly indeed did Cowper write;

Where has commerce such a mart,
So rich, so throng'd, so drain'd, and so supplied
As London - opulent, enlarg'd, and still
Increasing London ? Babylon of old
No more the glory of the earth than she,
A more accomplish'd world's chief glory now!

The river, as the source of almost all the greatness and wealth of the metropolis, and also as one of its chief ornaments, deserves especial notice at our hands.
But we are above, not below, London Bridge; so turning our backs on the warehouses which crowd the banks on either side from Wapping to the Tower, from Limehouse and Rotherhithe to Southwark Bridge, let us make our voyage westward, by the side of our new and magnificent embankment, imagining that, as we are treating at once of London "Old" and "New", we are sailing in our barge along the channel which so many great and historic personages, from kings and queens to prisoners of State, have traversed before us .
In London certainly the river has been from earliest times "the silent highway" between the Tower and Westminster.
As the Court was usually either at the Old Palace of Westminster or at Whitehall, and most of the king's liege subjects lived in and around the City proper, a boat was naturally the usual conveyance of great people, whether lords of Parliament, courtiers, or ambassadors, into the presence of the sovereign, especially at a time when as yet the Strand was unpaved, and when wagons stuck in its miry wheel ruts in the winter season.

As a proof of the importance of the Thames in old times as a thoroughfare from London to Westminster, it was ordered that the lanes and streets leading down to it were to be kept free from all impediments, so that persons going on horseback might experience no difficulty in reaching its banks.

Westminster from the Garden of Somerset House

A capital story, showing not only the value of the Thames, but the appreciation of that value by the citizens of London, is related concerning James I and a certain Lord Mayor in his reign.
James being in want of some twenty thousand pounds, applied to the Corporation of London for the loan of that sum.
The Corporation refused.
The king, whose notions of the regal power were somewhat arbitrary, sent for the Lord Mayor and certain of the aldermen, and rated them severely for their disloyalty, insisting that they should raise the money forthwith 'by hook or by crook'.
"May it please your majesty", said the Lord Mayor, "we cannot lend you what we have not got."
"You must get it." replied the king, haughtily.
"We cannot, sire." said the Lord Mayor.
"Then I'll compel you." rejoined the king.
"But, sire, you cannot compel us." retorted the Lord Mayor.
"No!" exclaimed James; "then I'll ruin you and your city for ever.
I'll remove my courts of law, my Court itself, and my Parliament to Winchester or to Oxford, and make a desert of Westminster; and then think what will become of you!"
"May it please your majesty." meekly but firmly, "you are at liberty to remove yourself and your courts wherever you please; but, sire, there will always be one consolation to the merchants of London: your majesty cannot take the Thames along with you."

The conservancy of the Thames was confirmed to the Lord Mayor and citizens of London by Henry IV., the same king whose dead body, by a strange fatality, is supposed to have been thrown into its waters.
This jurisdiction was confirmed by Parliament, in 1487; and in 1538 the Common Council of London passed several regulations for the improvement of the navigation of the river, many of which are in force down to the present time, though some have been allowed to lapse, as out of date, and applicable only to a bygone state of things.

Much of the scenery of the Thames in London and Westminster as it was at the commencement of the present century [1800-] has been rescued from oblivion by the brothers THomas and Paul Sandby, both Royal Academicians.
Their elaborate drawings, taken from the terrace and gardens of Somerset House exhibit on the Surrey side the landing stairs of Kper's Gardens and on the Middlesex shore that par of the old palace at Whitehall, then inhabited by the Duchess of Portland, on the site of which afterwards the houses of Lord Farnborough and other noblemen were erected.
There is also a scarce and valuable print showing the Thames at the Temple Gardens, executed and published, in 1671, under the auspices of Sir Heneage Finch, afterwards Earl of Nottingham, and reproduced in facsimile, in 1770-71, at the charge of one of his descendants.
It shows that the embanked front of the gardens was not straight, but broken by several recesses, in which are inserted stairs leading down to the water.
A quantity of wherries moored at their foot proves how usual a mode of conveyance to all parts of London and Westminster the Thames was two centuries ago.
The facsimile of the print was not published, and therefore it is to be found in only a few private collections.
Spenser, too, gives us a "Distant view of the Temple" in the following lines:

Those bricky towers
The which on Thamesis broad back do ride,
Where now the student lawyers have their bowers,
Where whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide,
Till they decayed through pride.

One of Sandby's prints of the river front of Somerset House shows, moored off the stairs of Somerset House, a floating coffee house, called "The Folly", the existence of which is known to few except curious antiquaries.
This was a lounge of the rich gay wits and gallants of the days of Addison and Steele, and an appendage to the coffee and chocolate houses ashore of which we have spoken in our walks round Covent Garden.
This floating coffeehouse appears by degrees to have attracted a disreputable company, and at last died a natural death, or was suppressed as a nuisance.
Being on the water, and not on terra firma, there are no titledeeds or other legal documents, or entries in the parish rate books, to help us in our inquiry as to its fate.
In its appearance it somewhat resembled the modern "house-boats" which serve as clubs for rowers at Oxford and at other places on the Thames.
"The Folly” — for such the structure alluded to was named - is said by Dr.C.Mackay to have been "as bulky as a man of war."
"The Folly" was divided into sundry rooms, with a platform and balustrade on the top.
A view of it as it rode at anchor off Somerset House is given in Strype's edition of Stow; and the humours of it are drawn to the life in Ned Ward's "London Spy".
"At first", says Sir John Hawkins, in a manuscript note in his "History of Music", "it was resorted to for refreshment by persons of fashion, and Queen Mary, with some of her courtiers, had once the curiosity to visit it; but it sank gradually into a receptacle for companies of loose and disorderly people, for the purposes of drinking and promiscuous dancing, and at length becoming scandalous, the building was suffered to go to decay, and the materials thereof became firewood."
In one of Tom D'Urfey's songs, called "A Touch of the Times", published in 1719, occurs the following allusion to "The Folly":

When Drapers' smugg'd apprentices,
With Exchange girls mostly jolly,
After shop was shut up and all,
Could sail up to 'The Folly.

Mr.Larwood, in his "History of Sign Boards", tells us that "The Folly" was not an unusual sign, and that it was generally applied to a very ambitious, extravagantly furnished, or highly ornamented house.
"In such a sense", he remarks, "it was already used in Queen Elizabeth's reign:

Kirby Castle and Fisher's Folly,
Spinola's Pleasure and Megse's Glory

"The Folly", at first, was very well frequented, and the beauty and the fashion of the period used to go there on summer evenings, partake of refreshments on the platform, and enjoy the breeze on the river, then innocent of modern sewers and filth.
Pepys paid it more than one visit, as he tells us in his Diary.
On one occasion it was honoured by a visit from Queen Mary and several members of her Court.
Gradually, however, "The Folly",' true to its name, took to evil courses; loose and disorderly ladies were admitted; and unrestrained drinking and dancing soon gave it an unenviable notoriety.
In this condition it was visited by Tom Brown, who describes it with his usual coarse vigour, and remarks of it as follows: "This whimsical piece of architecture was designed as a musical summerhouse for the entertainment of the quality, where they might meet and ogle one another.
He describes the company in very glowing colours, which it is not necessary to quote here, but tells us at last that he found it such a confused scene of "folly" that, though not a very bashful person, he was at last compelled to return to his boat without drinking.
At last the place became so scandalous that it had to be closed: it went to decay; and in the end, as we have already seen from Sir John Hawkins, "Folly" was chopped up for firewood! Sic transit gloria.

Not very far from where "The Folly" was moored a century and a half ago, there was seen anchored in our own day a wonderful vessel which had crossed the Indian Ocean and sailed round the Cape of Good Hope, and so up the whole length of the Atlantic; a veritable Chinese junk.

Chinese Junk 1848

It made the voyage, small as it was, without suffering wreck or disaster, and arrived in the Thames in 1848.
For a time it lay off Blackwall, where it was visited by thousands; among others, by Charles Dickens.
Afterwards, when the London "season" began, it was brought up just above Waterloo Bridge, and moored off the Strand.

Dickens describes the impression of a visit to the junk as a total, entire change from England to the Celestial Empire.
"Nothing", he writes, "is left but China.
How the flowery region ever came into this latitude and longitude is the first thing one asks, and it is certainly not the least of the marvel.
As Aladdin's palace was transported hither and thither by the rubbing of a lamp, so the crew of Chinamen before, lying sick on a bamboo couch in a private aboard the keying devoutly believed that their good ship would turn up quite safe at the desired port if they only tied red rags enough upon the mast, rudder, and cable.
Somehow they did not succeed.
Perhaps they ran short of rag; at any rate they had not enough on board to keep them above water; and to the bottom they would have undoubtedly gone if it had not been for the skill and coolness of half a dozen English sailors, who brought them over the ocean in safety.
Well, if there be any one thing in the world that this extraordinary craft is not at all like, that thing is a ship of any kind.
So narrow, so long, so grotesque, so low in the middle, so high at each end, like a china pen tray, with no rigging, with nowhere to go aloft; with mats for sails, great warped cigars for masts, dragons and sea monsters disporting themselves from stem to stern, and on the stern a gigantic cock of impossible aspect, defying the world (as well he may) to produce his equal; it would look more at home on the top of a public building, or at the top of a mountain, or in an avenue of trees, or down in a mine, than afloat on the water.
As for the Chinese lounging on the deck, the most extravagant imagination would never dare to suppose them to be mariners.
Imagine a ship's crew without a profile amongst them, in gauze pinafores and plaited hair, wearing stiff clogs a quarter of a foot thick in the sole, and lying at night in little scented boxes, like backgammon or chess pieces, or mother of pearl counters!
But, by Jove! even this is nothing to your surprise when you get down into the cabin.
There you get into a torture of perplexity; as, what became of all those lanterns hanging to the roof, when the junk was out at sea; whether they dangled there, banging and beating against each other, like so many jester's baubles; whether the idol Chin Tee, of the eighteen arms, enshrined in a celestial Punch's show, in the place of honour, ever tumbled out in heavy weather; whether the incense and the joss stick still burnt before her, with a faint perfume and a little thread of smoke, while the mighty waves were roaring all around?
Whether that preposterous tissue paper umbrella in the corner was always spread, as being a convenient maritime instrument for walking about the decks with in a storm?
Whether all the cool and shiny little chairs and tables were continually sliding about and bruising each other, and if not, why not?
Whether anybody on the voyage ever read those two books printed in characters like bird cages and fly traps?
Whether the mandarin passenger, He Sing, who had never been ten miles from home in his life before lying sick on a bamboo couch in a private china closet of his own (where he is now perpetually writing autographs for inquisitive barbarians), ever began to doubt the potency of the Goddess of the Sea, whose counterfeit presentiment, like a flowery monthly nurse, occupies the sailor's joss house in the second gallery? Whether it is possible that the second mandarin, or the artist of the ship, Sam Sing, Esquire, R.A. of Canton, can ever go ashore without a walking staff in cinnamon, agreeably to the usage of their likenesses in British tea shops?
Above all, whether the hoarse old ocean could ever have been seriously in earnest with this floating toy shop;or had merely played with it in lightness of spirit roughly, but meaning no harm? — as the bull did with another kind of china shop on St.Patrick's;day in the morning."

Close by the waterside, near where now stands Somerset House, formerly stood the ancient church of St.Mary the Virgin, the predecessor of the present church of St.Mary le Strand.
It is stated by a writer in the Sunday at Home that no less a person than Thomas à Becket was once rector of the parish.
But this statement “requires confirmation".
Another well known rector, in more recent times, was Dr. George Horneck, author of "The Crucified Jesus" and other popular religious treatises, who was so much beloved in London that it was said his parish stretched from Whitehall to Whitechapel.

At a corner house in the Strand, with the exact locality of which we are not acquainted, though Mr.P.Cunningham fixes it as "over against Strand Bridge", lived, in 1627, William Lilly the astrologer.
He had just then privately married the widow of his master, one Gilbert Wright, in whose house he had been, up to that time, employed in menial work cleaning the shoes and fetching tubs of water from the Thames; and having inherited her property seven years later, became the owner of house property in the neighbourhood, having, as he tells us in his autobiography, "purchased the moiety of thirteen houses in the Strand for £530."
Lilly, who is the "Sidrophel" of Butler's "Hudibras", and who prophesied for the Parliament and for the king, according to the times, died in 1681, and was buried in Walton Church, Surrey, where there is a monument with a Latin inscription by the antiquary Elias Ashmole, who styles this consummate impostor "Astrologus peritissimus".

For several years past, down to the close of 1873, might be seen moored off the bank of the river, nearly opposite Norfolk Street, the hull — we had almost said hulk - of a vessel which in its time had, we believe, "done the State some service" in foreign climes.
This was an old 16 gun frigate named the Royalist, which, having grown too old to be of any further use in the navy, had been converted into a floating police station, as the inscription in large capital letters, "Thames Police Station", painted upon its side, informed the passerby.
At the above date this vessel was removed "below bridge", to do duty in a similar capacity off Blackwall, in place of the Investigator.
The Thames Police have now a station on one of the floating platforms by Waterloo Bridge originally erected as a landing;stage for passengers by the steamboats, the waiting rooms of which have been fitted up to serve this purpose.

From the Report of the Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police issued in 1874, it appears that the total number of men employed in the Thames Police was upwards of 1,800, including a superintendent, 9 inspectors, 22 third;class inspectors, I detective sergeant, 3 detective constables, and 117 police constables.
The men selected, it need hardly be stated, have a good knowledge of "river thieves" and of those who act in collusion with them, for during the year above mentioned, by their vigilance and good management, upwards of 100 persons were apprehended for various offences.
In case of fire, too, either on board vessels or in waterside premises, the assistance rendered by the Thames Police is invaluable.
The Report alluded to tells us that during the year 1873 the Thames Police were instrumental in rescuing 32 persons from drowning; these, with 6 suicides prevented, make 38 lives saved by them during the year.
One case, showing the keen observation kept upon river craft, deserves mention.
About midnight of the 25th of September, a boat's crew off Wapping discovered a sailing barge so imbedded in the mud that the tide was flowing over the decks.
They hastened on board, and found her fast filling, and five persons asleep in the cabin; to rouse them was the work of a few moments; but the tide flowed so rapidly that one of the constables was waist deep in water before the last person was rescued.
Had it not been for the vigilance and timely aid of the police these five lives would in all probability have been sacrificed.
In cases of accident the Thames Police invariably render prompt assistance in conveying the sufferers to the nearest hospitals, and, when necessary, in giving information to their friends.
Some idea of the disagreeable and painful duties performed by this able and useful body of men may be gathered from the fact that in the year above mentioned the number of deaths which came under their cognisance amounted to no less than 150.
Of these 25 were suicides, 79 were accidentally drowned, 4 were from accidents at the riverside, and 42 about which there appears to have been some doubt as to how they came in the river, and who are, therefore, classed under the general heading of "found drowned".
Nearly all of these bodies passed through the hands of the police, were conveyed to the dead houses, descriptions taken and circulated, inquiries made to find friends, and coroners' inquests attended.
The building on the western portion of the landing stage whereon stands the Thames Police Station is used by the Royal Humane Society as a place for the reception of persons rescued from drowning.
This has been placed at the disposal of the Society by the Thames Conservancy, free of charge; and all the necessary appliances have been provided for rescuing bodies from the river, by means of a properly constructed boat, and for treating them when rescued.
The maintenance of this receiving house has caused a charge on the Society's funds to the extent of about £300 per annum, for the Society's men must be always in attendance, the apparatus and baths in readiness by night and by day, and a medical officer almost within call.
During the century which has elapsed since the Royal Humane Society was instituted, as we learn from the hundredth Annual Report, it has been the means of saving upwards of thirty eight thousand persons from premature death.
In the words of the Report, we may add that "no comment is necessary upon such a statement as this: it carries with it ample evidence of the beneficent work of the Society".

Death may usurp on Nature many hours,
And yet the fire of life kindle again
The overpressed spirits. I have heard
Of an Egyptian had nine hours lien dead,
By good appliance was recovered.

Shakespeare: Pericles, Act iii. sc.I.

Waterloo Bridge, with the contemplation of which we now resume our voyage westward; the bridges lying eastward having been dealt with in the previous volumes of this work; was considered by Canova to be "the noblest bridge in the world", the great artist backing up his enthusiasm with the assertion that it was "alone worth coming from Rome to London to see."
Indeed, the lightness, grace, and symmetry of the structure are such as to give the bridge a foremost rank in buildings of the kind; although it has perhaps been eclipsed by subsequent erections.
This grand and useful work, which M.Dupin, the celebrated French engineer, in his "Memoir" on the public works of England, called "a colossal monument worthy of Sesostris and the Cæsars", was produced by a joint stock company.
It was erected by the late Sir John Rennie, and, together with the approaches, cost about £1,000,000.
The Act for incorporating the Company, which is designated "The Strand Bridge Company", was passed in June, 1809.
Under this authority they raised the sum of £500,000, in transferable shares of £100 each, and had authority to raise a further sum of £300,000, by the issue of new shares or by mortgage, if they should find it necessary.
In July, 1813, the Company obtained another Act of Parliament, by which they were authorised to raise an additional sum of £200,000; and in the session of 1816 they obtained a third Act, which received the royal assent in July, and invested the Company with additional powers.
By this Act the name of the bridge was changed from that of the "Strand Bridge" to "Waterloo", in honour of that great and decisive battle.
It was very natural, considering the great and important victory which the Duke of Wellington had just gained over Buonaparte, that our countrymen during the Regency should have been somewhat profuse in applying the names "Wellington" and "Waterloo" to all and every sort of thing; Wellington streets, Wellington inns, and Wellington boots; Waterloo hotels, Waterloo academies, Waterloo coaches, and Waterloo bonnets — and that, when at a later date that class of conveyance was introduced, they should have adopted "Waterloo" as the designation of a line of omnibuses, and at last of a railway station.
The design, as executed, consists of nine semi-elliptical arches, with Grecian Doric columns in front of the piers, covered by an entablature and cornice, and surmounted by a balustrade.
The roadway upon the summit of the arches is level, in a line with the Strand, and is carried by a gentle declivity on a series of brick arches, some of which are used as warehouses, over the roadway on the Surrey bank of the river, to the level of the roads about the Obelisk by the Surrey Theatre.
The width of the river at Waterloo Bridge was 1,326 feet at high water before its curtailment by the Victoria Embankment; and the bridge consists of nine semi-elliptical arches, of 120 feet span, and thirty;five feet high, supported on piers thirty feet thick at the foundations, diminishing to twenty feet at the springing of the arches.
They are eighty;seven feet in length, with points in the form of Gothic arches as cutwaters towards the stream.
The first arch on the Middlesex side spans the Embankment.
The dry or land arches on the Surrey side amount to forty, thirty nine of which are semicircular, sixteen feet in diameter, and one semi elliptical, over the Belvidere Road, of twenty six feet diameter.
The entire length of the bridge and causeways is 2,426 feet, made up of 1,380 feet for the entire length of the bridge and abutments, 310 feet the length of the approach from the Strand, and 766 feet the length of the causeway on the land arches of the Surrey side.
The first stone of this fine bridge was laid on the 11th of October, 1811, and the foundations of which it was a part were built in coffer dams formed by three concentric rows of piles.
In building these majestic arches such care was taken by the able engineer under whose direction the bridge was built, that on removing the centres none of the arches sank more than an inch and a half;whereas, we are told, those of the celebrated bridge of Neuilly sank in several instances so much as to entirely destroy the original curvature of the arch.
When the allied sovereigns visited this country, in 1814, this bridge was in course of erection.
The Emperor Alexander I. of Russia upon several occasions visited the works, and declared it would be the finest work in masonry in the world.

It was opened with great pomp upon the second anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, June 18th, 1817, by the Prince Regent, accompanied by the royal dukes, Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, and attended by a brilliant staff of officers who were present at the battle of Waterloo.

From the centre of the bridge there is a finer view of London on the banks of the Thames than from any other.
Looking down the river, and immediately joining the bridge, close to the Embankment, rises the noble front of Somerset House; the finest object of the kind in London, not excepting the new Houses of Parliament, which appear too low.
A little further on, looking like a green oasis in the midst of a dark wilderness of warehouses and wharves, lie the pleasant gardens of the Temple.
Lower down is the new Blackfriars Bridge, rising behind which, in unrivalled grandeur, are the dome and towers of St.Paul's Cathedral, and below this the Monument, the spires of other City churches shipping, &c.

As a commercial speculation, we believe Waterloo Bridge has proved anything but profitable to the shareholders; but it must be some consolation to them that the works were so judiciously executed as to enable them to remain intact notwithstanding the changes in the bed of the river.
A toll of one halfpenny is charged for foot passengers over the bridge, and twopence for cabs, &c.
An agitation has been long going on with the view of bringing about the abolition of tolls, and at a meeting held in 1873 for the purpose of considering the matter it was stated that during the previous six years 5,000,000 persons anually passed over this bridge producing an income of above £21,000 per annum and that since the opening of the bridge the sum of £851,760 had been received by the company.
In order to form an approach from the Strand to Waterloo Bridge it was found necessary to remove very many interesting remains of ancient architecture;not only those belonging to the Savoy Palace on the west, but also several walls belong ing to the palace of the Duke of Somerset, with buttresses and pointed windows with Gothic tracery.
All memory of these old buildings has long since perished.

But it is time that we started on our voyage westward, noting on our way a few buildings which we did not describe minutely as we passed along the Strand.
"Next to the Savoy westward," writes the author of "London in the Olden Time," "was the palace of the Bishop of Carlisle, with grounds which extended to the lane running down to the river, called Ivy Bridge.
Of the history of this house we know nothing, nor when, nor by whom, it was built.
Aggass in his map represents a house of some extent as standing here, and Hollar gives an elevation of it.
But this shared the fate of other Church property at the Reformation, being seized by Henry VIII and given by him to the lucky courtier from Dorsetshire, John Russell, the controller of the Royal Household - the ancestor, it hardly need be said here, and the founder of the fortunes of the Ducal house of Bedford.
Carlisle House was afterwards known as Worcester House.

At the bottom of Ivy Bridge Lane was for many years the landing stage for the "halfpenny" steamboats plying between this place and London Bridge, one of which blew up here in August, 1847.

The Adelphi Terrace, which we pass soon after leaving Waterloo Bridge, at one time formed a conspicuous feature as seen from the river, but is so far removed by the broad Embankment with its garden, and thrown into the shade by the lofty railway station close by, that it may now be passed almost unnoticed.
Northouck, in writing of the new Adelphi Buildings, tells us that Mr.Lacy, the joint patentee with Garrick in Drury Lane, formed a plan for improving the whole north bank of the river upon a plan similar to that of the Adelphi Terrace, and that there exists a copper plate engraving of his design, engraved for private distribution.
Of this noble terrace we have spoken in a previous chapter, but we may be pardoned for here adding a short anecdote concerning Garrick, who lived and died in the centre house: we give it on the authority of Mr.Cradock's "Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs.
"When Jean Jacques Rousseau was in England, Garrick paid him the compliment of playing two characters on purpose to oblige him;and as it was known that Rousseau would be present, the theatre was of course crowded to excess.
Rousseau was highly gratified, but Mrs.Garrick declared that she had never spent a more unpleasant evening in her life, the recluse philosopher being so anxious to display himself, and hanging over the front of the box so much that she was obliged to hold him by the skirt of his coat to prevent him from falling over into the pit.
After the performance, however, he paid a very handsome compliment to Garrick by saying, 'I have cried all through your tragedy, and laughed all through your comedy, without being at all able to understand your language.'
At the end of the play Rousseau was entertained at supper at Garrick's house in the Adelphi, where many of the first literary characters of the time were invited to meet him..

Hungerford Suspension Bridge

Of the railway bridge which now crosses the river at this point we have already spoken in our account of the Charing Cross Railway, and a description of its predecessor, old Hungerford Suspension Bridge, will be found [on page 132 - quoted here]:
[The bridge by which the lines of railway are carried over the Thames consists of nine spans - six of 154 feet, and three of 100 feet — and is supported by cylinders sunk into the bed of the river, and by the piers and abutments of the old suspension bridge, the site of which it occupies.
The superstructure of each of the 154 feet openings consists of two main-girders, to the outer side of which are suspended cross-girders for carrying the roadway platform.
The cross girders extend beyond the main girders, and form a series of cantilevers on the outer side, for supporting a foot-path seven feet in width, by which foot-passengers pass over for a halfpenny toll. The superstructure of the three 100 feet openings is fan-shaped, and forms the connection of the bridge with the railway station.
A beautiful view of the Thames Embankment is obtained from the north end of Charing Cross bridge. ... ]
As we pass by Hungerford Bridge we can hardly help fancying that we can still see the building called "Hungerford Stairs", well known to the jolly Thames watermen of old, and of interest to English readers as one of the first abodes - we cannot call it home - of Charles Dickens, when a boy of ten.
Here, at the blacking warehouse of one "Jonathan Warren, Number 80, Hungerford Stairs" - it is well to be particular - the future "Boz" was engaged, in 1822 - 4, as a sort of shop drudge, at six shillings a week.
He says, in a sort of autobiographical sketch, published in his "Life," by Mr.John Forster: "The blacking;warehouse was the last house on the left hand side of the way at old Hungerford Stairs.
It was a crazy, break down old house, abutting on the river, of course, and swarming with rats.
Its wainscoted rooms, its rotten floors and staircases, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars and coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again.
The counting house was on the first floor, looking over the coal barges and the river, where I used to sit and work.
My work was to cover the pots of paste blacking, first with a piece of oil paper, and then wih a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string, and then to clip the paper close and neat all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop.
When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots.
Such was the intellectual occupation to which, instead of school, his parents consigned the future novelist, whilst they were living, if not in comfort, at all events in decency, in Bayham Street, Camden Town, and afterwards in Gower Street North.
"No words," says Charles Dickens, "can express the agony of my soul as I sank into this companionship, and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast.
At this time, he remembered (as his biographer, Mr.Forster, tells us) to have spent his dinner hour in playing about on the coal barges, or strolling about the back streets of the Adelphi, and exploring the recesses of its dark arches, in company with his youthful companions, "Poll" Green and Bob Fagin.
One of his favourite localities was the little public house, by the waterside, called "The Fox under the Hill","* approached by an underground passage, and outside which, as he tells us in "Copperfield,” he remembered having sat "eating something on a bench, and looking at some coal;heavers dancing before the house.
The blacking warehouse at Hungerford Stairs was removed afterwards to the corner of Chandos Street and Bedford Street, Covent Garden, and young Charles Dickens removed thither along with it, as part and parcel of the establishment.
He tells us that so thoroughly did he dislike his drudgery there that, after quitting Hungerford, he never went back to look at the place where his servitude had began till old Hungerford Stairs were destroyed, and that for many a long year he could not bear to pass along Chandos Street, or to smell the cement that was used in the offensive trade.
Here at Hungerford Bridge;or to give it its more common designation at the present time, Charing Cross Bridge, floating swimming baths are in course of erection.
These baths, which are planned on an extensive scale, containing many thousand gallons of filtered water, will be open for bathers of either sex.
Experiments have been made which have established beyond all doubt that the Thames water can be easily and effectually filtered.
When filtered it is found to contain a very large proportion of sea water - in fact, we have heard it said that at high tide it is almost entirely sea water, clear and green, as at Ramsgate or Margate.
But this statement we are inclined to question.
Less than half a century ago the Thames, without undergoing the process of filtering, was pure enough for the Westminster boys both to row on it and to bathe in it; so that Gray might have addressed to the river under the royal towers of Westminster the noble lines in which he apostrophises it beneath the spires of Eton and Windsor:

Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race
Disporting on thy margent green
The paths of pleasure trace;
Who foremost now delight to cleave
With pliant arm thy glassy wave?
The captive linnet which enthral?
What idle progeny succeed
To chase the rolling circle's speed,
Or urge the flying ball?

Immediately after passing under Charing Cross Railway Bridge the Houses of Parliament and other edifices connected with Government come full into view.
Close by the western side of the railway station, and extending to Scotland Yard, appeared, until their demolition towards the close of the year 1874, the gardens and grounds of Northumberland House, the historic mansion of the Percies, about which we have already spoken in a previous chapter.
Now that Northumberland House is demolished, in order to form a broad and open thoroughfare from Charing Cross to the Victoria Embankment, we obtain a partial view of the National Gallery and also of the lofty Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square, with the steeple of St. Martin's Church close at hand - a cluster of buildings which leads us to exclaim, in the words of a modern poet:

Behold, anent Art's palace, near a church
Of most surpassing beauty, and amid
Statues of kings, a pillar! no research
Need peer it out, for it will not be hid:
Up in the broad day's lustre doth it stand,
A column raised to dear and dazzling fame,
Mantling with pride the bosom of the land,
And stamping glory there with Nelson's name.

" Further westward, towering above the cupola of the Horse Guards, and dwarfing everything else around it, stands the York Column;a poor imitation of Trajan's Column;of which we shall have more to say when we shall have extended our perambulation to the neighbourhood of Carlton Gardens.
The noble "banqueting house" of Whitehall, too, rears itself proudly on our right above the princely mansions and dwellingsof the nobility which partly surround it, and whose gardens and lawns, before the formation of the embankment, were washed by the "silver streaming Thames". All traces of the old Palace Stairs and the Privy Stairs of Whitehall which stood about here have long since disappeared; but its memory has been preserved in the pages of history.
There the remains of many distinguished personages have been landed preparatory to interment.
Those of Queen Elizabeth, of the poet Cowley, and of Lord Nelson, will occur at once to the reader of English history.
When Elizabeth died at her palace at Sheen, or Richmond, in 1603, her coffin was brought in a barge with great state down the river to Whitehall, in order to be interred in the Abbey.
The same was the case in 1667, with Abraham Cowley, on his death at Chertsey, where he spent the later years of his life, and where his house is still standing.
To the latter occasion Pope gracefully alludes in the following lines:

There the last numbers flow'd from Cowley's tongue.
Oh! early lost! what tears the river shed
When the sad pomp along his banks was led!
His drooping swans on every note expire,
And on his willows hung each Muse's lyre.

Cowley's funeral is thus mentioned under date July, 1667, by John Evelyn in his Diary:
Went to Mr. Cowley's funeral, whose corpse lay at Wallingford House, and was thence conveyed to Westminster Abbey in a hearse with six horses and all funeral decency - near a hundred coaches of noblemen and persons of quality following - amongst these all the wits in the town, divers bishops and clergymen.
He was interred next Geoffrey Chaucer and near Spenser.

A good story is told, the scene of which must have been not far from Westminster Bridge, of a rising and popular divine, who was being ferried across before the bridge was built, and who was being carried, in spite of the efforts of the waterman, out of his course, either up or down the river.
It is epigrammatically told in verse, in the last of which the reverend gentleman observes:

With the tide we must swim;

on which the wit who recounts the story adds, with a waggish humour:

To St. Paul's or to Lambeth was all one to him.

Still sailing up the stream, we shortly reach our landing place by the arches of Westminster Bridge.

Old Westminster Bridge 1738 - 1862

The original structure, the second bridge built in London, was commenced in 1738 and finished in 1750.
The Corporation of London had a notion that it would injure the trade of the City; and while the bill for its erection was under discussion in Parliament, they opposed it "tooth and nail".
"For many years afterwards," writes Dr.C.Mackay in his "Thames and its Tributaries," with a playful and pardonable exaggeration, "London aldermen thought it a pollution to go over it, and passed it by with as much contempt as a dog would pass by a 'stinking brock'.
So highly, however," he adds, "was the bridge esteemed by its proprietors that they procured the admission of a clause into the Act of Parliament by which the punishment of death without benefit of clergy was declared against any one who should wilfully deface and injure it.
Dogs also were kept off it with as much rigour as that with which they are now excluded from Kensington Gardens."
Of course this is mere badinage.

It cannot be too often impressed upon the reader that whenever mention is made in the writers of the Tudor or Stuart times of "bridges" existing in London, save and excepting London Bridge, they really mean only landing piers.

From a very early time the citizens of London appear to have regarded the construction of a second bridge with intense jealousy, and from time to time any and every effort to construct a second one, though at a very remote distance, roused the fiercest opposition: an instance of which is to be found in the debate which occurred in Parliament in 1671 upon a proposal to erect a bridge at Putney, the rejection of the bill being effected by the influence of the Londoners.

The inconvenience which had been occasioned by the great resort of coaches, and other vehicles, passing and repassing at the Westminster side, induced Dr.Potter, Archbishop of Canterbury, and several noblemen, to procure an Act of Parliament in the year 1736, for building a bridge across the river Thames, from New Palace Yard, Westminster, to the opposite shore in the county of Surrey.
This act, however, was not obtained without great opposition from the City of London, as well as from Southwark;and some fainter efforts in the same direction were used by the bargemen and watermen of the Thames.
But private interest was obliged to give way to public advantage, and preparations were made for carrying on this great undertaking under the sanction of the Legislature.

It should be mentioned here that the original design was for a wooden bridge, which idea was set aside after the severe frost of 1739 - 40, when the Thames was frozen over several weeks, and some of the piers for the wooden bridge were carried away.
A stone bridge, from its greater durability, was then decided on, and the funds in aid of the expense were defrayed by public lotteries and Parliamentary grants.
The ballast men of the Trinity House were employed to open a large hole for the foundation of the first pier to a depth of five feet under the bed of the river; and this being finished and levelled at the bottom, it was kept clear by a proper inclosure of strong piles.
In the meantime a strong caisson was prepared of the form and dimensions of the intended pier in the clear.
This was made waterproof, and being brought over the place, was secured within the piles.
In this wooden case the first stone was laid on the 29th of January, 1738/9, by Henry, Earl of Pembroke.
The caisson was above the high water mark, and sinking gradually by the weight of the prodigious blocks of stone, the men could work below the level of the water as conveniently as on dry ground.
Thus the middle pier was first formed, as were all the rest in the same manner; and when finished, the sides of the caisson being taken asunder, the stonework appeared entire.
The time occupied in building the bridge was eleven years and nine months; and the total expense, including the repairs of the piers, which sank during the erection, amounted to £389,500.
The opening ceremony took place on the 17th of November, 1750.

Till the building of Westminster Bridge the only communication between Lambeth and Westminster was by the ferry boat near the palace gate, which was the property of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and granted by patent under a rent of twenty pence.
On opening Westminster Bridge, in 1750, it ceased, and £2,205 were given to the see as an equivalent.
Previous to that time, there were two considerable inns for the reception of travellers, who, arriving in the evening, did not choose to cross the water at such an hour, or, in case of bad weather, might prefer waiting for better.

Old Westminster Bridge Alcove

On the 13th of November, 1750, the commissioners of the new bridge appointed a number of watchmen to guard it, and ordered thirty two lamps of a particular size to be fixed on it.
The treasurer of the bridge, we are told, “paid the rulers of the Watermen's Company, and the stewards of the chests at Westminster, £2,500, to be laid out in some of the funds secured by Parliament to maintain the poor of the said chests, instead of the money gained by the Sunday ferry for foot passengers.

Old Westminster Bridge was long considered a triumph of engineering skill.
Labelye, the architect, introduced a system of foundations which is stated to have answered very well in numerous cases, but which failed utterly here; namely, in sinking the caissons, as above stated, with the lower courses already built upon them.
During the progress of the work some trifling disturbances of the bed of the river gave rise to settlements, which were easily repaired at the time.
Upon the enlargement of the tideway, however, in consequence of the removal of Old London Bridge, the scouring action of the river soon carried away the substratum of several of the piers of the bridge;and, finally, after much discussion, many years' repair, great and constant expense, and occasional interruption of the carriage traffic, its demolition became a matter of necessity.

The old bridge was built of Portland stone;it was 1,223 feet in length by 44 feet in width, and there were thirteen large and two small semi circular arches, springing about two feet above low water mark.
The centre arch was 76 feet span, the others decreasing on each side by regular intervals of 4 feet each, excepting the small arches, which were 25 feet span each.
The parapet on each side was surmounted by an open balustrade.
Between each ́arch was a semi octagonal recess or turret, which afforded a covered shelter for foot passengers.
Owing to the sinking of the piers, however, and the generally unsafe condition of the bridge, these turrets were removed some years before the total demolition of the bridge, and some of them re-erected in Victoria Park, where they serve as alcoves.
With regard to these turrets, Labelye, the architect, says they were not only built for their evident accommodation of passengers, desiring or obliged to stop without interfering with the road; or for the relief they afforded to the eye in breaking so long a line, but for the additional security they gave to the bridge, by strengthening the parts between the arches, and thereby affording so much more weight to repel the lateral pressure.
Maitland, however, mentions a more serious purpose to which these recesses might have been put;
he says "they might have served for places of ambush for robbers and cut throats," but for the establishment of a guard of twelve watchmen specially appointed for the security of the passage during the night.
The writer of the account of Westminster, in the "Beauties of England and Wales," mentions a peculiarity which these recesses possessed, somewhat analogous to the whispering gallery in St. Paul's Cathedral.
He says, "So just are their proportions, and so complete and uniform their symmetry, that, if a person whispers against the wall on the one side of the way, he may be plainly heard on the opposite side; and parties may converse without being prevented by the interruption of the street or the noise of carriages."

the new bridge at Westminster, which occupies the place of the old one, but which is almost double the width, is a very handsome structure built chiefly of iron. It was commenced in 1855 by Mr. Page, and completed in 1862, the later part of the work having been carried out under the direction of the late Sir Charles Barry, the well known architect. The present bridge was constructed in two portions, the first half being erected at the western side of the original structure, and opened for traffic, after which the demolition of the old bridge was proceeded with; the remaining half — occupying the exact site of the old bridge — was added on the eastern side of the new structure. The bridge is 1,160 feet long by 85 feet wide, and is at once graceful and massive; it consists of seven arches (the centre one having a span of 120 feet), resting on granite picrs, the parapet and ornamental portions having been designed to accord with the adjacent Houses of Parliament. The roadway is 53 feet wide, and the footways 15 feet; the former is divided into going and coming roads, and has tramways, or grooves, for the wheels of heavy vehicles. The cost of construction of the present bridge was £206,000. It is well known that in 1638 the bed of the Thames between Westminster and Lambeth was made the depository of the Great Seal of England by James I “He obtained possession of it” says Mr. Jesse, in his "London", on the night of his flight from Whitehall, and. purposely let it fall into the water as he passed across the river. Mr. Jesse adds that not long afterwards the seal was recovered by a fisherman and restored to the Government. The following beautiful sonnet, composed by William Wordsworth in 1803, gives us a lifelike picture of London as seen from the river at Westminster at sunrise on a summer morning.

Earth has not anything to show more fair
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;
This city now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie,
Open unto the fields and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his frst splendour valley, rock, or hill -
Ne'er saw I — never felt — a calm so deep.
The river glideth at its own sweet will,
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep,
And all that mighty heart is lying still.

"Of the London and Westminster of Chaucer's time", writes Mr. Matthew Browne in his pleasant work, "Chaucer's England", there is little which the poet, however forewarned, would recognise if he were to return. The Thames, certainly, he would scarcely know, with its many bridges. The London Bridge of Peter Colechurch, with its crypt and fishpond in one of the piers, and the drawbridge arch over which rushed the insurgent commons of England under Wat Tyler, he would surely miss. And John of Gaunt's London palace of the Savoy which the insurgents burnt ; would he know it? or would he know Westminster Abbey? Not Henry the Seventh's chapel, of course; nor Sir Christopher Wren's clumsy towers. Not St Paul's, which in his days had a spire. Not the streets ; assuredly not the Strand, which in the days of the Plantagenets was really a strand sloping down to the river, with only a house here and there. He would know the Tower, however, and Lambeth Palace, perhaps, and St Mary's Overies, where his contemporary, Gower, was married by William of Wykeham.” But even the Thames has seen its changes. Three hundred years ago the river on both sides was fringed with trees and flowers to such an extent that Izaak Walton quotes the compliment of a German poet of his own time:

So many gardens dressed with curious care
That Thames with royal Tiber may compare.

Indeed, this noble river has been a great theme for poets of all time, and deservedly. It is called by Pope the "silver Thames" and the "fruitful Thame"; by Spenser "the silver-streaming Thames", and by Herrick "the silver-footed Thamesis". Sir John Denham's charming lines, So descriptive of the English beauty of the Thames, often as they have been quoted, will bear repeating here:

Oh! could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear;though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage; without o'erflowing full.

Drayton, too, in a poem published in "England's Helicon" in 1600, thus eulogises the Thames and along with it Elizabeth under the fanciful name of "Beta":

And oh! thou silver Thames, O dearest crystal flood!
Beta alone the phoenix is of all thy watery brood;
The queen of virgins only she,
And thou the queen of floods shalt be.
Range all thy swans, fair Thames, together in a rank,
And place them duly one by one upon thy stately bank.

But it is sadly to be feared that such poets were inspired less by a reverence for Father Thames than by a desire to stand well with the always vain but now aged queen, whom Horace Walpole, with his usual cynicism, describes at this period as being "an old woman with bare neck, black teeth, and false red hair". The river and the metropolis, both so dear to Englishmen, are thus fantastically celebrated by Pope in his "Windsor Forest", from which we quote the following lines:

From his oozy bed
Old Father Thames advanced his reverend head;
His tresses dropped with dews, and o'er the stream
His shining horns diffused a golden gleam:
Graved on his arm appeared the moon that guides
His swelling waters and alternate tides:
The figured streams in waves of silver rolled,
And on her banks Augusta rose in gold.

In Drayton's poem, "Polyolbion," published in 1613, in "The Seventeenth Song"," we read:

When Thames now understood what pains the Mole did take,
How far the loving nymph adventured for his sake;
Although with Medway matched, yet never could remove
The often quick'ning sparks of his more ancient love.
So that it comes to pass, when by great Nature's guide
The ocean doth return, and thrusteth in the tide
Up towards the place where first his much loved Mole was seen
He ever since doth flow beyond delightful Shene.

Pope, in his imitation of Spenser, has described the alleys on the banks of the river in and about London minutely and vividly, but in lines which will scarcely bear quotation.
And the poet Gray describes in effect its quiet and peaceful character, when he asks in one of his letters to Warton,
"Do you think that rivers which have lived in London and its neighbourhood all their days, will run roaring and tumbling about like your tramontane torrents in the North?"
The following charming verses on our much loved river, from the first volume of "Once a Week", based on the quaint expression of Leland, who speaks of London as "a praty town by Tamise ripe," are not so well known as they deserve to be:

Of Tamise ripe old Leland tells
I read, and many a thought up-swells
Of Nature in her gentlest dress,
Of peaceful homes of happiness,
Deep meadowed farms, sheep-sprinkled downs,
Fair bridges with their 'praty towns, By Tamise ripe'.

Fair Oxford with her crown of towers,
Fair Eton in her happy bowers,
The reach by Henley broadly spread
High Windsor, with her royal dead,
And Richmond's lawns and Hampton's glades;
What shore has memories and shades Like 'Tamise ripe'?

Not vine-clad Rhine, nor Danube's flood,
Nor sad Ticino, red with blood,
Not ice-born Rhone or laughing Seine,
Nor all the golden streams of Spain;
Far dearer to our English eyes
And bound with English destinies
Is 'Tamise ripe'.

High up on Danesfield's guarded post
Great Alfred turned the heathen host;
Below the vaults of Hurley sent
A tyrant into banishment;
And still more sacred was the deed
Done on the isle by Runnymede
On 'Tamise ripe'.

And down where commerce staineth tide
Lies London in her dusky pride,
Deep in dim wreaths of smoke enfurled,
The wonder of the modern world:
How mach to love within the walls
That lie beneath the shade of Paul’s
By 'Tamise ripe' !

The romance of the river Thames, not in its sylvan, fishing, boating, and swan-upping aspect above bridge, but in its melodramatically maritime characteristics below bridge, was a theme which seemed to afford unflagging delight to Charles Dickens.
Thames mud appeared to the great novelist redolent of mysterious interest, and the waterside scenes in "The Old Curiosity Shop," including the wharf where Mr. Quilp, the dwarf, broke up his ships, where Mr.Sampson Brass so nearly broke his shins, and where the immortal Tom Scott so continuously stood on his head, were rivalled in graphic vividness thirty years afterwards by the waterside scenes and characters pictured in "Our Mutual Friend".

But with all this it is certain that the romance of the river between London Bridge and Greenwich has been for many years declining, and that civilisation is all the better for the disappearance of those picturesque features described in 1798; not, indeed, in a work of fiction, but in a most forcible, albeit prosaic manner by Mr. C. Colquhoun, one of the police magistrates of the metropolis.
The lighter buzzards, the "light horsemen", the sham "bummarees" and felonious "stevedores," the "tea skippers", "whisky runners," and "rough scullers"; in other words, the robbers, piratęs, smugglers, and murderers who formerly infested the Pool and the Port of London; are now but a feeble folk in comparison with the great flotilla of river desperadoes denounced by Mr. Colquhoun, whose work mainly led to the establishment of the Thames Police.
Since then Cuckold's Point and Execution Dock have fallen out of the chart, and, with the exception of an annual proportion of lighter robbing and tobacco smuggling, the river Thames may, in the present day, be considered as quite respectable.
In Fitzstephen's time the Thames at London was indeed "a fishful river", and we read of the Thames fishermen presenting their tithe of salmon at the high altar of the abbey church of St.Peter, and claiming, on that occasion, the right to sit at the Prior of Westminster's own table.
At this period the supply of fish materially contributed to the subsistence of the inhabitants of the metropolis, and the river below the site of the present London Bridge abounded with fish.
In 1376/7 a law was passed in Parliament for the saving of salmon and other fry of fish; and in 1381/2 "swannes" that came through the bridge or beneath the bridge were the fees of the Constable of the Tower.

The regulations respecting the keeping of swans on the Thames have always been very strict, and from a very early date the privilege of being allowed to keep them has always been jealously guarded.
For example, we find that in the twenty second year of the reign of Edward IV., 1483, it was ordered that no person not possessing a freehold of the clear yearly value of five marks should be permitted to keep any swans; and in the eleventh year of Henry VII., 1496, it was ordained that any one stealing a swan's egg should have one year's imprisonment, and be fined at the king's will; and stealing, setting snares for, or driving grey or white swans, were punished still more severely.
In the time of Henry VIII. no persons having swans could appoint a new swanherd without the licence of the king's swanherd;and every 'dead;houses';scarcely less repulsive;dotted swanherd on the river was bound to attend upon the king's swanherd, on warning, or else pay a fine.
The Royal swanherd was obliged to keep a book of swan marks, in which no new ones could be inserted without special licence.
Cygnets received the mark found on the parent bird, but if the old swans had no mark at the time of the "upping" (or marking), then the old and young birds were seized for the king, and marked accordingly.
No swanherd was allowed to mark a bird, except in the presence of the king's swanherd or his deputy.
When the swan made her nest on the bank of the river, instead of on one of the islands, one young bird was given to the owner of the soil, in order to induce him to protect the nest.
This was called the ground bird.
The Dyers' and Vintners' Companies have for several hundred years enjoyed the privilege of preserving swans on the Thames from London to some miles above Windsor, and they still continue the old custom of going with their friends and guests with the Royal swanherdsman, and their own swanherds and assistants, on the first Monday in August in every year, from Lambeth, on their swan voyage, for the purpose of catching and "upping" (or marking) all the cygnets of the year.
The junior warden of the Vintners' Company is called the swan warden; the appointment to the office of Royal swanherd being vested in the Lord Chamberlain for the time being.
Eton College has also the privilege of keeping these birds.
At one period the Vintners' Company possessed over 500 swans, but the number is now much less, as, since they have ceased to be served up at great banquets and entertainments, the value of them has greatly declined.

[Here follows a rather harrowing description of the suicides and recovery of corpses and their subsequent disposal. May I be forgiven for omitting it?]

of the Thames watermen and wherrymen brief mention has been made in the second volume of this work (see pages 51 and 52): we may, how ever, add here a few more particulars concerning this once celebrated and now almost extinct body of men.
As may easily be imagined, they formed very much of a caste by themselves, and recognised their kinship in the craft by being ambitious of burial, when they died, in the southern side of the churchyard of St.Martin's-in-the-Fields.
They were a rough, saucy, and independent lot, if we may judge from allusions to them which occur in the novels, comedies, farces, and popular songs of the last century.
Their phraseology, too, was as peculiar as that of the cabmen and omnibus drivers of our own day.
Peter Cunningham calls it "the water dialect or mob language", the use of which he reckons as "one of the privileges of the river assumed by the fraternity", a language of which Ned Ward and Tom Brown have both left us specimens, and of which Fielding complains so touchingly in his "Voyage to Lisbon"; and he quotes, in support of his statement, several passages from Ben Jonson, Samuel Pepys, and Wycherley.
It will be remembered that in the Spectator (No.383) Sir Roger de Coverley is "shocked" at the saucy language with which he is greeted by two or three young fellows, whilst taking his pleasure in a boat on the Thames; and Boswell, in his "Life of Johnson", records the fact that once when the learned doctor was in a similar situation, he gave back a wherryman raillery for raillery in terms which we can scarcely quote in these pages.
The Thames watermen received their licences from, and were directly amenable to, the Lord Mayor and the other members of the Thames Conservancy;and their fares were regulated by a published scale of charges a hundred years ago.
A copy of the "Rates of Watermen plying on the River Thames, either with oars or skullers," dated 1770, gives a table of charges, showing that a fare could be carried with "oars" for a shilling from London Bridge to Limehouse, Shadwell Dock, or Ratcliff Cross; or from either side above London Bridge to Lambeth or Vauxhall.
Eightpence was the charge for the same mode of conveyance from the Temple, Blackfriars, or Paul's Wharf to Lambeth;
whilst sixpence would frank a voyager from London Bridge or St.Olave's, Tooley Street, to "Wapping Old Stairs" or Rotherhithe Church; or from Billingsgate and St.Olave's to St.Saviour's Mill, from any stairs below London Bridge and Westminster, or from Whitehall to Lambeth or Vauxhall;
whilst any lady or gentleman could be ferried over the water directly from any place between Vauxhall in the west, and Limehouse in the east, for fourpence.
The charges for “skullers” for each of the above-named voyages were exactly half the sums here named.
The authorised "rates of oars, down and up the river, as well for the whole fare as for company" — in other words, for single voyager, or each person forming a party — are curious.
From London to Greenwich or Deptford, the charge for a single individual was eighteenpence, to Blackwall two shillings, to Woolwich half a crown, to Purfleet or Erith three shillings, to Grays or Greenhithe four shillings, and to Gravesend four and sixpence.
When persons made the voyage in parties, each of the company, be the latter large or small, was to be charged about a sixth of the above rates.
The same regulations held good "above bridge” also.
You could be taken by "oars" to Chelsea, Battersea, or Wandsworth for eighteenpence; to Putney, Fulham, or Barnes for two shillings; to Hammersmith, Chiswick, or Mortlake for half a crown; to Brentford, Isleworth, or Richmond for three and sixpence; to Twickenham for four shillings ; to Kingston for five ; to Hampton Court for six; to Hampton town, Sunbury, or Walton for seven; to Weybridge or Chertsey for ten; to Staines for twelve; and all the way to Windsor for fourteen. shillings.
If a party was got up for the occasion the charge was a shilling for each individual for any distance beyond Kingston, even as far as Windsor.

To the above list the same little book gives in an appendix the "Rates authorised for carrying goods in the tilt-boat from London to Gravesend.
For this passage the charge was for each single person, ninepence ; for a hogshead of liquor, two shillings ; for a firkin of goods, twopence; for half a firkin, a penny; for a hundredweight of dry goods, fourpence ; for a sack of com, salt, etc., sixpence ; for an "ordinary hamper," sixpence ; and it is added, for the information of those whom it may concern, that "the hire of the whole tilt-boat was £1 2s 6d"
By a "tilt" boat of course is meant a boat with a covering ; the term still survives, as we need hardly remind our readers, in the term "tilt cart".
It is interesting to compare these rates of transit by oars and scullers along "the silent highway" of old Father Thames with the fares charged nowadays to voyagers along. goods in the tilt;boat from London to Gravesend.
" For this passage the charge was for each single person, ninepence;for a hogshead of liquor, two shillings;for a firkin of goods, twopence;for half a firkin, a penny;for a hundredweight of dry goods, fourpence;for a sack of corn, salt, &c.
, sixpence;for an "ordinary hamper," sixpence;and it is added, for the information of those whom it may concern, that "the hire of the whole tiltboat was £1 2s.
6d.
" By a "tilt" boat of course is meant a boat with a covering;the term still survives, as we need hardly remind our readers, in the term "tilt" cart.
It is interesting to compare these rates of transit by oars and scullers along "the silent highway" of old Father Thames with the fares charged nowadays to voyagers along the same route in cheap steamers, although the latter have so maliciousty doubled their charges between London and Westminster.

The olden recreations on the noble Thames are of great celebrity.
Fitzstephen tells us of the ancient Londoners fighting "battles on Easter holidays on the water, by striking a shield with a lance".
There was also a kind of water tournament, in which the combatants, standing on two wherries, rowed and ran against the other, fighting with staves and swords.
In Gower's time the sovereign was rowed in his tapestried barge, probably the first royal barge upon the Thames; and upon this great highway Richard II, seeing the good old rhymer, called him on board the royal vessel, and there commanded him to "make a book after his hest", which was the origin of the "Confessio Amantis".
At this period a portion of London Bridge was movable, so that vessels of burthen might pass up the river, to unload at Queenhithe and elsewhere; and stairs, watergates, and palaces studded both shores.
At this time, too, we are informed, boats conveyed passengers, for the sum of twopence each, from London to Gravesend.

One of the most interesting annual events in the present day in connection with the Thames watermen, and perhaps the most popular gala day now which gladdens the heart of the multitudes, next to Derby Day at Epsom and the Oxford and Cambridge boatrace, is the one afforded by Thomas Doggett, comedian, on the 1st of August, to commemorate the accession of the House of Brunswick.
"This scene" says Mr.J.T. Smith in his "Book for a Rainy Day", "is Sure to be picturesque and cheerful should it be lit up by the glorious sun that gems the sea and every land that blooms".
In 1715, the year after George I came to the throne, Dogget, to quicken the industry and raise a laudable emulation in our young men of the Thames, whereby they not only may acquire a knowledge of the river but a skill in managing the oar with dexterity, gave an orange coloured coat and silver badge, on which was sculptured the Hanoverian Horse, to the successful candidate of six young watermen just out of their apprenticeship, to be rowed for on the 1st of August, when the current was strongest against them, starting from the Old Swan, London Bridge, to the Swan at Chelsea.
On the 1st of August, 1723, the year after Doggett's death, pursuant to the tenor of his will, the prize was first rowed for, and has been given annually ever since.

They gripe their oars, and every panting breast
Is raised by turns with hope, by turns with fear depressed

Charles Dibdin was so amused with the sight of the contest for Doggett's prize, that in 1774 he brought out at the Haymarket a ballad opera, entitled The Waterman: or, the First of August, the hero in which, "Tom Tug," sings the well, known song

And did you ne'er hear of a jolly young waterman,
Who at Blackfriars Bridge used for to ply?
He feathered his oars with such skill and dexterity,
Winning each heart and delighting each eye;

and another when he has resolved to cast away his cares and be off to sea:-

Then, farewell, my trim built wherry,
Oars and coat, and badge, farewell!
Never more at Chelsea ferry
Shall your Thomas take a spell, &c.

However, Tom rowed for Doggett's coat and badge, which he had an eye upon, in order to obtain his love if possible by his prowess.
She was seated at the "Swan Inn," Chelsea, and admired the successful candidate before she discovered him to be her suitor Thomas, then "blushed an answer to his wooing tale," and it is to be hoped lived happily with him for ever afterwards.
The old "Swan Inn" at Chelsea, we may add, was swept away about the year 1873 to make room for the Thames Embankment; but the coat and badge is still rowed for, the destination of the race being the Cadogan Pier at Chelsea.
The Fishmongers' Company, of which Thomas Doggett was a member, add a guinea to the prize;and besides this there are several other prizes awarded to the different competitors in the race.
The second and third prizes are respectively allotted five eighths and three eighths of the interest on £260 17s.3d., formerly £200 South Sea Stock, left in the will of Sir William Jolliffe, the amounts respectively being £4 17s.9d. and £2 18s.9d.
The prize for the fourth man is £1 11s.6d., and for the fifth and sixth men each £1 1s., the last three given by the Fishmongers' Company.
There are also different sums occasionally given by private individuals to the winner, or to the first, second, and third in the race.
The competition is by six young watermen whose apprenticeships have expired the previous year; each being in a boat by himself with short oars or sculls.
The bargemaster of the Fishmongers' Company is ordinarily the umpire; and the race always excites much local interest, being one of those many sports in which the English take much pleasure.
Thomas Doggett is stated to have been a native of Dublin, and to have been born about the middle of the seventeenth century.
Colley Cibber, speaking of him, says, "As an actor he was a great observer of Nature;and as a singer he had no competitor.
He was the author of the "Country Wake," a comedy published in 1696, and was a patentee of Drury Lane Theatre until 1712.
He died in 1721.
It may be added that Doggett was not the only actor who took an interest in the Thames watermen, for the proprietors of the old Vauxhall Gardens, and Astley the equestrian, gave wherries to be rowed for; as did also Edmund Kean, the tragedian.

Among the most celebrated of Thames watermen in bygone days was Taylor, "the water poet," of whom we have already spoken.
Miss Benger thus apostrophises both the poet and the river at once:

And thou, O Thames, his lonely sighs hast caught.
When one, the rhyming Charon of his day,
Who tugged the oar, yet conned a merry lay,
Full oft unconscious of the freight he bore,
Transferred the musing bard from shore to shore.
Too careless Taylor! hadst thou well divined,
The marvellous man to thy frail skiff consigned,
Thou shouldst have craved one tributary line,
To blend his glorious destiny with thine!
Nor vain the prayer! who generous homage pays
To genius, wins the second meed of praise.

Down to about the middle of the seventeenth century, when not only coaches, but also sedan chairs, had become pretty general, the Thames had formed the great medium of metropolitan conveyance.
Its banks on either side were studded thick, as far as London extended, with the quays and "stairs" of the nobles, and wharves of the commons, while its waters were peopled with every kind of vessel, from the bucentaur like barge of royalty, to the nutshell skiff or wherry.
In 1454, Sir John Norman, Lord Mayor elect, built a magnificent barge for the use and honour of his mayoralty; before his time it was usual for the chief magistrate and his train to go to Westminster Hall on horseback.
The companies followed Norman's example, and constructed elegant vessels to accompany their mayors.
The watermen were so elated by this circumstance that they caused a commemoration song to be composed on the occasion, beginning, "Row thy boat, Norman," &c.
Down to the time of the discontinuance of the "water pageant" as part of the Lord Mayor's state procession to Westminster, the officials connected with the state barge included the water bailiff, one of his lordship's esquires, with a salary of £500 a year, a shallop, and eight men; and in the suite were a barge master and thirty two City watermen.
The watermen, clad in the livery and wearing the silver badge won in the match above mentioned, still take part in the Lord Mayor's Show on the 9th of November; and the trumpeters who formerly heralded his lordship's approach to Westminster from the prow of the gilded barge, now precede his lordship's state carriage on foot in all civic state ceremonies.
The remains of Anne of Bohemia, queen of Henry VII., who died at Richmond, were honoured with a state funeral by water, being brought with great pomp by the river to Westminster.
In 1533 the mayor and citizens accompanied Anne Boleyn in their barges from Greenwich to the Tower, preparatory to her coronation at Westminster; and this was the highway along which that unfortunate lady and more than one other of the wives of Henry VIII. made their last journey.
Along it also "the seven bishops" were conveyed from Westminster to the Tower in the reign of James II.
Mr.Peter Cunningham briefly reminds us that State prisoners committed from the Council Chamber to the Tower or the Fleet were invariably taken by water.
Passing up the Thames on frequent occasions might be seen in mid stream the royal barge of Queen Elizabeth with her Majesty on board in gayest trim, on her way up the stream along with the tide going to her palace at Westminster, and possibly to land at Whitehall Stairs, or at the Westminster Palace Water Gate, at that time known, as we learn from Ralph Aggas' map, as "The Queen's Stairs.

Old Whitehall Stairs

After the great civil war, however, the royal water processions dwindled into the paltry annual pageant of the Lord Mayor's Show; and even this, we need hardly say, has now died out.
The state barge last in use by the Lord Mayor was built in 1816, and named the Maria Wood (from the then Lord Mayor's eldest daughter);it was very capacious, and richly carved and gilt.
A few of the City Companies had their own state barges, "to attend my Lord Mayor;" as the Fishmongers, Vintners, Dyers, Stationers, Skinners, and Watermen.
The barge belonging to the Goldsmiths' Company was sold in 1850.
The Queen maintains her river state barge, though it has not been used since the year 1849, when she went by water to open the new Coal Exchange; the rowers of the royal barge, however, still wear scarlet state liveries, though, like Othello, they find their occupation gone.
The Lords of the Admiralty have likewise their state barge; but these are seldom or never now brought into use.
The nobility, in imitation of royalty, laid aside their gilded barges; the fashionables who dwelt near the Thames, at St. Katharine's, Bankside, Lambeth Marsh, Westminster, Whitefriars, Cole harbour, and other such convenient localities for a water fête, preferred an inland picnic among the gardens or forests, to which their carriages could waft them in an hour or two; while the busy Inns of Court, whose thousands of students and practitioners had hitherto used the facilities of the river alike for business or for pleasure, were now to be found flying along the streets with their books, briefs, and green bags, six in a coach.
The Thames, no longer the great highway of London, had become little better than a water conveyance, in the absence of bridges, between the City and the Borough; and the small clusters of ferrymen that now lingered on at the different crossing places, looking out hungrily for a chance fare, were but the ghosts of a departed glory, as they uplifted their voices in supplication with, "Boat, your honour! boat, boat!"
The Thames was the usual road, and persons, a century ago, spoke of "taking the water" as we speak of taking a cab or omnibus.
To quote an instance from the Somerset House Gazette:-
'You do me great honour, Mr.Handel,' said my great uncle.
'I take this early visit as a great kindness.
'A delightful morning for the water,' said Colley Cibber.
'Pray, did you come with oars or scullers, Mr. Handel?' asked Pepusch, who had lately been setting the airs to the songs in the Beggar's Opera.

It may interest some readers, however, to learn that when George IV. came to the throne there were still 3,000 wherries plying on the Thames, while the hackney coaches could muster only a sorry 1,200 in the whole of London.
As late as the year 1829, if not more recently still, a boat was the usual conveyance from the neighbourhood of Westminster to Vauxhall; and Mr.J.T.Smith, in his "Book for a Rainy Day," tells many anecdotes about the "Thames watermen," whose work was of course at an end as soon as new bridges were built and cheap steamboats put upon the river.

A couple of centuries ago the river was so clear and pure that the noblemen who lived upon its banks along the Strand used to bathe in it constantly.
It is on record, for instance, that in the reign of Charles I. such was the practice of Lord Northampton; and Roger North tells us, in his "Lives of the Norths," that his relative, Dudley North, used to swim on the Thames so constantly, and "above bridge," too; that "he could live in the water an afternoon with as much ease as others walk upon land."
Horace Walpole, too, tells Lady Craven in one of his letters that Lord Chesterfield waggishly addressed a letter to his friend the Earl of Pembroke, who was fond of swimming in these parts, "To the Earl of Pembroke, in the Thames, over against Whitehall".
Lord Byron tells us in one of his letters, in 1807, that he took a swim from Lambeth through Westminster and Blackfriars Bridges down to London Bridge apparently, or even lower, for he reckons the length of his voyage as three miles.

That a very different state of things exists now with regard to the condition or the appearance of the Thames may be inferred when we state that from the report of the Medical Officer of Health, submitted to the Corporation of London towards the close of 1874, it appears that during the month of September of that year 2,083 vessels had been inspected in the river and the docks between Vauxhall and Woolwich, 366 of which required cleansing, 93 sick sailors had been found afloat and referred to the Seamen's Hospital at Greenwich, and of 19 samples of drinking water taken from vessels in various parts of the port for purposes of analysis, seven were found unfit for human consumption.

The practice of carrying Asiatic crews on board British ships has revived very much since 1872, and there are now always from 500 to 700 Lascars in this port, some living on board the ships to which they belong, and many taking up their quarters in the House for Asiatics at Limehouse.

Those who do not know what the state of things was in the Thames in the days when shipping discharged in the stream may be astonished to read of the doings little short of piratical which were a part of the established order of things, and prevailed into the reign of George IV., when the opening of the West India Docks enabled at least a portion of the shipping to discharge their cargoes with some safety.
In 1798 the depredations from merchant vessels in the river Thames were estimated by Mr.Colquhoun to amount to £506,500 a year.
"Scuffle hunters," longshore thieves, mudlarks, "Peterboatmen," river pirates, "light horsemen," and last, but not least, the captains and mates of the vessels and the revenue officers themselves preyed upon the shipping, and "one gigantic system of plunder seems to have prevailed throughout."
Not only hogsheads of sugar and puncheons of rum, but anchors, cables, and other tackle were carried off by thieves; and mates and revenue officers seem to have had a regular scale of charges for retiring to their berths while robbery of the hold or deck was going on.
"Most of these infamous proceedings," says Mr.W.S.Lindsay, in his work on "Our Mercantile Marine," "were carried on according to a regular system, and in gangs, frequently composed of one or more receivers, together with coopers, watermen, and lumpers, who were all necessary in their different occupations to the accomplishment of the general design of wholesale plunder.
They went on board the merchant vessel completely prepared with iron crows, adzes, and other implements to open and again head up the casks; with shovels to take out the sugar, and a number of bags made to contain 100 lb. each.
These bags went by the name of 'black strap,' having been previously dyed black to prevent their being conspicuous in the night when stowed in the bottom of a river boat or wherry.
In the course of judicial proceedings it has been shown that in the progress of the delivery of a large ship's cargo about ten to fifteen tons of sugar were on an average removed in these nocturnal expeditions, exclusive of what had been obtained by the lumpers during the day, which was frequently excessive and almost uncontrolled whenever night plunder had occurred.
This indulgence was generally insisted on and granted to lumpers to prevent their making discoveries of what they called the 'drum hogsheads' found in the hold on going to work in the morning, by which were understood hogsheads out of which from one sixth to one fourth of the contents had been stolen the night preceding.
In this manner one gang of plunderers was compelled to purchase the connivance of another to the ruinous loss of the merchant.
It was estimated that about 11,000 persons got a dishonest livelihood by taking part in the rascalities which received their first death blow from the high walls of the West India Docks.
On the manifold advantage of the dock and bonded warehouse system, which now extends to every shipping port in the kingdom, it is needless to dilate, though outsiders will thank Mr.Lindsay for the clear and interesting explanation of the course of shipping business as it is now conducted in his work above referred to.

Towards the end of the year 1874 there were upwards of 300 boys on board the Chichester and Arethusa training ships, lying in the Thames, being educated and trained to man the Royal Navy and Merchant Service.
These vessels are recruited from the Refuge for Homeless and Destitute Boys in Great Queen Street.
The mercantile importance of this noble stream is greater than that of any other river in the world.
Its merchantmen visit the most distant parts of the globe; and the productions of every soil and of every clime are wafted home upon its bosom to answer the demands of British commerce.
The frozen shores of the Baltic and North America, the sultry regions of both the Indies, and the arid coasts of Africa have alike resounded with its name; and there is not a single country, perhaps, in any quarter of the earth, bordering on the sea, that has not been visited by its sails.

CHAPTER XXXIX. THE RIVER THAMES (continued).

Cœlo gratissimus amnis. (Virgil)

Happily in our latitude winter is not often so severe as to "bind in frosty chains" the river which runs through the heart of our metropolis; but still, if the old annalists and historians are to be believed, the Thames from time to time has been frozen into ice fields, and its surface has been made the scene of frost fairs.
To mention a few instances:

We are told that in the reign of Stephen, in the year 1150, "after a very wet summer there was in December so great a frost that horses and carriages, crossed it upon the ice as safely as upon the dry ground, and that the frost lasted till the following month of March."

Again we read that in 1281 the Thames was frozen over, and that on the breaking up of the ice five of the arches of old London Bridge were carried away.

"In 1434," says Northouck, "the Thames was so strongly frozen over, that merchandise and provisions brought into the mouth of the river were obliged to be unladen, and brought by land to the city."

In 1515, too, carriages passed over on the ice from Lambeth to Westminster.
At this time it is said the frost and snow were so severe that five arches of London Bridge were "borne downe and carried away with the streame.

On the 21st of December, 1564, during the prevalence of a hard frost, we read of diversions on the Thames, some playing at football, and others "shooting at marks".
The courtiers from the palace at Whitehall mixed with the citizens, and tradition reports that Queen Elizabeth herself walked upon the ice.
On the night of the 3rd of January following, however, it began to thaw, and on the 5th there was no ice to be seen on the river.

In 1620 a great frost enabled the Londoners to carry on all manner of sports and trades upon the river.

In a curious volume of London ballads and broadsides in the British Museum is one entitled "Great Britain's Wonder, or London's Admiration," being 'a true representation of a prodigious frost which began about the beginning of December, 1683, and continued till the fourth day of February following.
It held on the Thames with such violence that men and beasts, coaches and carts, went as frequently thereon as boats were wont to pass before.
"There was also" (continues the writer) "a street of booths built from the Temple to Southwark, where were sold all sorts of goods imaginable, namely, cloaths, plate, earthenware, meat, drink, brandy, tobacco, and a hundred sorts of commodities not here inserted: it being the wonder of this present age and a great consternation to all the spectators."

Frost Fair 1683

The rude cut beneath the title shows the Middlesex shore, taken from the centre of the river, from Arundel House to the eastern end of the Temple; giving a view of Essex Buildings with its ugly round headed arch, and the three groups of stairs belonging to Arundel House, Essex House, and the Temple.
The street of booths holds out all sorts of signs, just like the houses in the Strand.
There are men and boys making slides, skating, and sledging in all directions; some of the sledges are of the ordinary type, like the low brewer's dray drawn by heavy horses; some are more artistic, made up like gondolas; some are apparently genuine boats, with sails; in two places are carriages drawn by a single horse, and just opposite the Temple Stairs a bull is being baited.
Gallants in the fashionable dresses of the day are promenading, with wigs and swords; while the ladies, true to the instinct of their sex, are "shopping" briskly.
In a corner are five men playing at skittles;one of them is smoking a pipe.
The doggerel verses below the cut tell how

The Thames is now both fair and market too,
Where many thousands daily do resort.
There you may see the coaches swiftly run,
As if beneath the ice were waters none,
And shoals of people everywhere there be,
Just like the herrings in the brackish sea.
And there the quaking watermen will stand ye,
'Kind master, drink you beer, or ale, or brandy;
Walk in, kind sir, this booth it is the chief,
We'll entertain you with a slice of beef.'
Another cries, 'Here, master, they but scoff ye;
Here is a dish of famous new;made coffee.'
There you may also this hard frosty winter,
See on the rocky ice a WORKING PRINTER,
Who hopes by hos own art to reap some gain,
Which he perchance may think he may obtain,
Here also a lottery, music too,
Yea a cheating, drunken, lewd and debauched crew,
Hot codlins, pancakes, ducks, and goose, and sack,
Rabbit, capon, hen, turkey, and a wooden jack,

There on a sign you may most plainly see 't,
Here's the first tavern built in Freezeland Street.
There is bull;baiting and bear;baiting too.

There roasted was a great and well;fed ox
And there with dogs hunted the common fox.

Another rough print in the same collection, taken from almost the very same point of view, entitled "A True Description of Blanket Fair upon the River Thames in the Time of the Great Frost, in the Year of our Lord 1683," gives a representation of the ox being roasted, and also of the "hunting the fox," Reynard being pursued by two men with clubs and five queer looking dogs: in this one of the carriages has two horses;the verses are just a shade above those already quoted, but running in the same descriptive vein, as will be seen from the following specimen:

The art of printing there was to be seen,
Which in no former age had ever been;
And goldsmiths' shops well furnished with plate;
But they must dearly pay for 't that would ha' it
And coffee houses in great numbers were
Scattered about in this cold freezing fair.
There might you sit down by a char cole fire
And for your money have your heart's desire,
A dish of coffee, chocolate, or tea:
Could man desire more furnished to be?

In the same collection is a ballad, of a few weeks' later date, "The Thames uncas'd;or, the Waterman's Song upon the Thaw;" the last stanza runs thus:

Meantime, if ought of honour you've got,
Let the printers have their due,
Who printed your names on the river Thames,
While their hands with the cold look'd blue;
There's mine, there's thine, will for ages shine,
Now the Thames again does flow;
Then let's gang hence, to our boats' commerce,
For the frost is over now.

In another ballad, printed and sold on the ice about this time, entitled "Blanket Fair, or History of Temple Street, being a Relation of the Merry Pranks played on the River Thames during the Great Frost," we read

I'll tell you a story as true as 'tis rare,
Of a river turn'd into a Bartlemy Fair.
Since old Christmas last,
There has bin such a frost,
That the Thames has by half the whole nation bin crost.
O scullers! I pity your fate of extreams,
Each landman is now become free of the Thames.

On the 1st of January, 1684, John Evelyn tells us that whole streets of booths were set out on the Thames, and that he crossed the river on the ice on foot upon the 9th in order to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth, and again, in his coach, from Lambeth to the Horseferry at Millbank, upon the 5th of February.
On the 6th he observes that the ice had "now become so thick as to beare not onely streetes of boothes in which they roasted meate, and had divers shops of wares quite acrosse as in a towne, but coaches, carts, and horses passed over.
At this time there was a footpassage quite over the river, from Lambeth stairs to the Horse ferry at Westminster; and hackney coaches began to carry fares from Somerset House and the Temple to Southwark.
On January 23rd, the first day of Hilary Term, they were regularly employed in hire, where the watermen were accustomed to be found.
In this arrangement the means of conveyance only, and not the ordinary way, was altered; since the use of boats to Westminster was almost universal at the period, as the rough paving of the streets rendered riding through them in coaches very uneasy.
By the 16th the number of persons keeping shops on the ice had so greatly increased that Evelyn says, "the Thames was filled w ith people and tents selling all sorts of wares as in the City;" and by the 24th the varieties and festivities of a fair appear to have been completely established.
"The frost," he states, "continuing more and more severe, the Thames before London was still planted with boothes in formal streets, all sorts of trades, and shops furnish'd and full of commodities, even to a printing presse, where the people and ladys tooke a fancy to have their names printed, and the day and yeare set down, when printed on the Thames.
This humour took so universally, that 'twas estimated the printer gained about £5 a day for printing a line only at sixpence a name besides what he got by ballads etc.
In a poem commemorative of the frost, published at the time, there occurs the following passage relating to the printersthe concluding four lines of which have been used in some of the verses produced at every frost fair, from that in 1684 to the last in 1814:-

To the print house go
Where men the Art of Printing seem to know:
Where, for a Teaster, you may have your name
Printed, hereafter for to shew the same;
And sure, in former ages, ne'er was found
A Press to Print where men so oft were drown'd!

Evelyn also quaintly tells us how that "coaches plied from Westminster to the Temple, and from several other staires, to and fro, as in the streetes: sleds [sledges], sliding with skeetes [skates], a bullbaiting, horse and coach races, puppet plays and interludes, cookes, tippling, and other lewd places; so that it seem'd to be a bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water."
This traffic and festivity were continued until February 5th, when the same authority states that "it began to thaw, but froze again.
My coach crossed from Lambeth to the horse ferry at Millbank, Westminster.
The booths were almost taken downe ;but there was first a map or land skip cut in copper, representing all the manner of the camp, and the several actions, sports and pastimes thereon, in memory of so signal a frost.
London, by reason of the excessive coldness of the aire hindering the ascent of the smoke, was so fill'd with this fuliginous steame of the sea coale, that hardly could one see across the streetes; and this filling the lungs with its gross particles, exceedingly obstructed the breath, so one could scarcely breathe.
There was no water to be had from the pipes and engines; nor could the brewers and divers other tradesmen work; and every moment was full of disastrous accidents."
It was during the continuance of this fair that Evelyn saw a “human salamander," when he dined at Sir Stephen Fox's, and "after dinner came a fellow who ate live charcoal, glowingly ignited, quenching them in his mouth, and then champing and swallowing them down.
There was also a dog which," Evelyn quaintly remarks, "seemed to do many rational actions.

The very curious original drawing of this fair, engraven on a reduced scale in Smith's "Antiquities of London," represents the Thames, looking from the western side of the Temple Stairs, appearing on the left, towards London Bridge, which is faintly shown in the view at the back with all the various buildings standing upon it.
"The time when the view was taken," says the author of that work, "was the day previous to the first thaw, as the original is dated in a contemporaneous hand at the top of the right hand corner, Munday, February the 4th, 1683/4."
The drawing consists of a spirited though unfinished sketch, on stout and coarse paper in pencil, slightly shaded with Indian ink; which was the well known style of an artist of the seventeenth century, peculiarly eminent for his views, namely, Thomas Wyck; usually called Old Wyck, to distinguish him from his son John; who spent the greater part of his life in England.
This sketch is preserved in the Illustrated Pennant's London, formerly belonging to Mr. John Charles Crowle, in the Print Room of the British Museum.
On the right of the view is an oblique prospect of the double line of tents which extended across the centre of the river, called at the time Temple Street, consisting of taverns, toy shops, &c., which were generally distinguished by some title or sign, as the 'Duke of York's Coffee house,' 'the Tory booth,' 'the booth with a phenix on it, and insured to last as long as the foundation stands,' 'the Half way House,' 'the Bear Gardenshire Booth,' 'the Roast Beef Booth,' 'the Music Booth,' the Printing Booth,' 'the Lottery Booth,' and the Horn Tavern Booth,' which is indicated about the centre of the view by the antlers of a stag raised above it.
On the outside of this street were pursued the various sports of the fair, some of which are also shown in the annexed plate; but in the nearer and larger figures introduced in the pictorial map mentioned by Evelyn, there appear extensive circles of spectators, surrounding a bull baiting, and the rapid revolution of a whirling chair or car, drawn by several men by a long rope fastened to a stake, fixed in the ice.
Large boats covered with tilts, capable of containing a considerable number of passengers, and decorated with flags and streamers, are represented as being used for sledges, some of them being drawn by horses, and others by watermen, in want of their usual employment.
Another sort of boat was mounted on wheels, and one vessel called the 'Drum boat' was distinguished by a drummer placed at the prow.
The pastimes of throwing at a cock, sliding and skating, roasting an ox, foot ball, skittles, pigeon holes, cups and balls, &c., are represented in a large print as being carried on in various parts of the river; whilst a sliding hutch propelled by a stick, a chariot moved by a screw, and stately coaches, filled with visitors, appear to be rapidly moving in various directions, and sledges with coals and wood are passing between the London and Southwark shores.
The gardens of the Temple and the river itself are both filled in the large plate with numerous spectators, as they are also shown in the present view; but, in addition to its originality, the drawing now engraven is, perhaps, more pictorially interesting than the print, from the prospect being considerably more spacious and carefully executed; as it exhibits the whole line of the Bankside to St.Saviour's Church, with the Tower, the Monument, finished in 1577, the Windmill near Queenhythe, the new Bow Church, and some others of the new churches, the vacant site and ruins of Bridewell Palace, and Old London Bridge.
With our copy of this interesting drawing is introduced another equally curious relic of the same Frost Fair, from the collection of Henry Hyde, second Earl of Clarendon, and formerly in the collection of Mr.William Upcott.
It consists of an impression of the specimen of printing on the ice, executed for King Charles II. and the Royal Family who visited the fair with him.
The names upon the paper are Charles, King; James, Duke (of York, his brother, subsequently King James II.); Katherine, Queen (Catharine, Infanta of Portugal, Queen of Charles II.); Mary, Duchess (Mary d'Este, sister of Francis, Duke of Modena, the second duchess of James); Anne, princess (the second daughter of the Duke of York, afterwards Queen Anne); George, prince (the princess's husband, George of Denmark).
The concluding name, "Hans in Kelder," was no doubt dictated by the humour of the king; it literally signifies "Jack in the Cellar," and alludes to the interesting situation of the Princess Anne.
The card, which was printed with a type border, was worded as follows:

Card printed on the river for Charles II 1683/4

Charles II seems to have been very partial to "Frost Fair".
He is reported to have joined a fox hunt on the Thames; and a French traveller, present in London at the time states in a small volume printed at Paris, that the King on one occasion passed a whole night upon the ice.
A contemporaneous notice of Frost Fair contained in a diary cited in The Gentleman's Magazine for 1814, states that on February 2nd, in 1684, an ox was roasted whole over against Whitehall, and that King Charles and the Queen ate a part of it.

Old Whitehall Palace

His Majesty appears to have taken much pleasure in viewing the lively scene from his palace, since in the poem also printed upon the ice, entitled "Thamesis's Advice to the Painter," there occur the following lines: —

Then draw the king, who on his leads doth stray
To view the throng as on a Lord Mayor's day,
And thus unto his nobles pleased to say:
'With these men on this ice I'd undertake
To cause the Turk all Europe to forsake;
An army of these men, arm'd and complete,
Would soon the Turk in Christendom defeat.

The print of Frost Fair, referred to in the diary of Evelyn, is entitled "An Exact and Lively Mapp or Representation of Boothes and all the varieties of Showes and Humours upon the Ice on the River of Thames by London, during that memorable Frost, in the 35th Yeare of the Reigne of His Sacred Majesty King Charles the Second, Anno Dm. MDCLXXXIII.[1683] , with an Alphabetical Explanation of the most remarkable figures.
It consists of a whole sheet copper plate, the prospect being represented horizontally from the Temple Stairs and Bankside to London Bridge.
In an oval cartouche at the top of the view, within the frame of the print, appears the title; and on the outside, below, are the alphabetical references with the words, "Printed and sold by William Warter, Stationer, at the signe of the Talbott under the Mitre Tavern in Fleete Street, London."
An impression of this plate will be found in the Royal Collection of Topographical Prints and Drawings given by George IV. to the British Museum, vol.xxvii, art.39
There is also a variation of the same engraving in the City Library at Guildhall, divided with common ink into compartments as if intended to be used as cards, and numbered in the margin in type with Roman numerals, in three series of ten each and two extra.
A descriptive list of the other prints, printed papers, and tracts relating to the Frost Fair of 1683/1684, will be found in Wilkinson's "Londina Illustrata," vol.
i., whence much of the preceding notices has been derived; another list is contained in the catalogue of the Sutherland collection of Prints and Drawings inserted as illustrations in Lord Clarendon's "Life" and "History of the Rebellion," and Burnet's "History of his Own Times".
Again the Duke of York (James II.) writes to his son in law;and destined supplanter, William of Orange under date January 4th 1683/4:
"The weather is so very sharp and the frost so great that the river here is quite frozen over, so that for these three days past people have gone over it in several places, and many booths are built on it between Lambeth and Westminster,and sell drink."
During the continuance of the frost at this time, which lasted until the 4th of February, about forty coaches plied on the Thames as on dry land, and the scene enacted on the glassy surface of the river in its course through London was known as "Frost" or "Blanket" fair.

In 1709 the Thames was again frozen over, but the frost was not sufficiently permanent to allow of a repetition of Frost Fair, although several persons crossed over on the ice.

In the winter of 1715/16 the frost was again so intensely severe that the river Thames was frozen over during almost the space of three months.
Booths were erected on the congealed river for the sale of all kinds of commodities, and all the fun of the fair of 1684 was revived.
On the 19th of January, 1716, two large oxen were roasted whole on the ice; the vast quantities of snow (which had fallen at different times in the season) rendered the City almost impassable.
The Prince of Wales was attracted to the fair, and a newspaper of the day intimates that the theatres were almost deserted.

The winter of the year 1739, generally known as "the hard winter," was a season of distress to the labouring part of the public.
A most severe frost began on Christmas Day, and continued till the ensuing February.
Its severity was beyond precedent, and the effect produced was long felt.
Many persons who had lived in Hudson's Bay territory declared that they had never known it colder in that frozen region than it was in England during that winter.
The Thames was soon covered with floating rocks and shoals of ice; and when these were fixed, the river represented a snowy field rising in many places in hillocks and huge heaps of icebergs, and many artists seized the opportunity of making sketches of the strange scene thus presented "above bridge".
The river Thames was so solidly frozen that great numbers of people dwelt upon it in tents, and a variety of booths was erected on it for the entertainment of the populace.
A few days after it began there arose a very high wind, which did considerable damage to the shipping, that happened at that time to be very numerous.
Several vessels laden with corn, others with coals, &c., were sunk by the ice; many had holes beat in their sides by falling on their anchors: several lighters and boats were confined under the ice; in short, a more dismal scene presented itself on the river Thames than had ever been beheld by the oldest man living.
The damage done between the Medway and London Bridge was computed at £100,000, and besides many persons lost their lives from the severity of the weather.
The watermen and fishermen were entirely disabled from earning their livelihood, as were the lower classes of labourers from their employment in the open air; and the calamity was rendered more severe by coals and other necessaries being advanced in their price in proportion to the intenseness and continuance of the frost.
Happily for the poor, the hand of charity was liberally extended;great benefactions were given by persons of opulent fortunes, and considerable collections were made in most of the parishes in London; and from this benevolent assistance many wretched families were preserved that otherwise must have inevitably perished.
During the nine weeks' continuance of the frost coaches plied upon the Thames, and festivities and diversions of all kinds were enjoyed upon the ice.
Little or no novelty, however, appears to have been introduced into the amusements of this fair, and the same things were done as on the former occasion, even to the roasting of the regulation ox on the ice, a feat which appears to have been accomplished with some little ceremony, for we read that "Mr. Hodgeson, a butcher of St.James's Market, claimed the privilege of knocking down the beast as a right inherent in his family, his father having knocked down the ox roasted in the river in 1684, as he himself did that roasted in 1715 near Hungerford Stairs."
The beast was fixed to a stake in the open market, and Mr. Hodgeson "came dressed in a rich laced cambric apron, a silver steel, and a hat and feathers, to perform the office." Printing booths were again set up on the ice, and at one of these establishments, bearing the sign of the "Golden King's Head," was sold "An Account of the principal Frosts for above a Hundred Years," with a frontispiece of London Bridge at the time of the frost, which purported to have been printed on the ice.
Another popular publication was "The Humble Petition of the River Thames to the Venerable Sages of Westminster Hall," in which we read that "ministers of punishment have treated him with the utmost contempt and insolence, have even made a publick shew of him, have call'd in heaps of ragamuffins to trample upon him, and, what is worst of all, have forced a numerous family, which he used to provide for, to beg in the streets."
In this fair "Doll, the Pippin Woman," alluded to in Gray's "Trivia," lost her life:

Doll every day had walk'd these treacherous roads;
Her neck grew warp'd beneath autumnal loads
Of various fruit: she now a basket bore;
That head, alas! shall basket bear no more.
The crackling crystal yields, she smiles, she dies;
Her head chopt off, from her lost shoulders flies;
'Pippins', she cries, but Death her voice confounds;
And pip, pip, pip, along the ice resounds.

Towards the end of December, 1767, a violent frost began, which continued to increase, and was very severe till the 16th of January following.
During its continuance, the distresses of the poor in town and country were truly pitiable.
Fuel and other necessaries of life were remarkably dear: the river Thames was frozen so hard, that the navigation was entirely stopped both above and below the bridge: many persons perished in boats and other craft that were jammed in by the ice; and the wherries in the river were wholly unemployed.
Many accidents happened in the cities of London and Westminster, and several people perished by the cold in the streets.
The severity of the frost was equally felt in the country; many persons were found dead in the snow, the roads were rendered quite impassable, and it was at the imminent hazard of their lives, that the coachmen and mail drivers performed their journeys.
This was followed by a violent hurricane, by which damage was sustained, in the City and its neighbourhood, to the amount of £50,000.

Again there was a very severe frost in 1777/8, and the Thames was frozen over at Kingston.

In the winter of 1788/9 the Thames was again frozen over, and a bear hunt is stated to have taken place on the ice off Rotherhithe.
During this frost the fair on the ice occupied a considerably larger space than on any previous occasion, extending as it did from Shadwell to Putney; it included, among other amusements, a travelling menagerie of beasts which moved about from place to place.

At the beginning of January, 1811, a very severe frost set in.
On the 8th, the Thames was so much frozen, that there was only a narrow channel in the centre free from ice.
The banks of the river were so firmly set with ice and snow that people could walk upon it from Battersea Bridge to Hungerford Stairs.

In Hughson's "London" we read that "the year 1814 began with an immense fog which lasted about a week, during which a number of accidents occurred.
On the 8th of January, however, the fog disappeared, in consequence of a change of wind; and a frost then set in, almost as unexampled in its duration and severity as the fog had been for its density.
The frost continued with little intermission till the 20th of March.
On the 31st of London, several persons walked across the Thames between London and Blackfriars Bridges.
And on the 3rd of February a sheep was roasted on the ice on the same spot, and the whole space between the two bridges had become a complete fair.
Thousands of persons were seen moving in all directions; about thirty booths were erected for the sale of porter, spirits, &c., as well as for skittles, dancing, and other diversions.
Several printers had presses on the ice, and pulled off various impressions, for which they found a very rapid sale.
So long a continuance of cold weather has seldom been experienced in our climate.
Cyrus Redding records in his "Fifty Years' Recollections" having spent this "bitter" winter in London and having "walked from Blackfriars to London Bridge on the ice, dirty, and impure, and lumpy as it was.
He describes it as "a dreary looking scene."
He adds, however, "The serpentine skaters, the promenading, the streets piled up with snow and ice, and the well and ill clad spectators, as they were then combined, were amusing novelties."

Ice blocking the river in 1814

A cotemporary[sic] account states, with minute precision, that on the morning of Sunday, the 30th of January, 1814, huge masses of ice quite blocked up the Thames between London and Blackfriars Bridges, and that no less than seventy persons walked across from Queenhithe to the opposite shore.
On the same night the frost so welded the vast mass together into one compact field as to render it almost immovable by the tide.
On Tuesday the river presented a solid surface from Blackfriars Bridge to some distance below Three Crane Stairs, and "thousands perambulated the rugged plain, whereon a variety of amusements was provided.
Among the more curious of these," continues the account, "was the ceremony of roasting a small sheep: for a view of this extraordinary spectacie sixpence was demanded and willingly paid.
The delicate meat, when done, was sold at a shilling a slice, and termed 'Lapland mutton'.
There were set up a great number of booths, ornamented with streamers, flags, and signs, and within them was a plentiful supply of favourite luxuries.
Near Blackfriars Bridge, however, the ice was not equally secure;for a plumber, named Davies, having imprudently ventured to cross with some lead in his hands, sank between two masses, and was seen no more.
Two young women, too, nearly shared the same fate, but they were rescued from their perilous situation by the prompt efforts of some of the Thames watermen.
From the solid obstruction the tide did not appear to ebb for some days more than half the usual mark.
On Wednesday, the 2nd of February, the sports were repeated, and the Thames presented a complete 'frost fair' for a few days.
The grand 'mall' or walk now extended, not as on former occasions across the river, but down the centre from Blackfriars to London Bridge;this was named the 'City Road,' and was lined on both sides by booths of all descriptions.
Eight or ten printing presses were erected, and numerous cards and broadsides were printed on the ice in commemoration of 'the great frost'.
Some of these frost fair typographers showed considerable taste in their handy work.
At one of the presses was hoisted an orange coloured standard, with the watch word 'Orange Boven' in large letters, in allusion to the recent restoration of the Stadtholder to the Government of Holland, which had been for several years under the dominion of the French.
From this press, too, were issued such papers as this:

Amidst the arts which on the Thames appear
To tell the wonders of this icy year
Printing demands first place, which at one view
Erects a monument of That and You

Another paper runs thus:

You that walk here and do design to tell
Your children's children, what this year befell
Come buy this print and it will then be seen,
That such a year as this has seldom been.

A handbill printed and sold on the ice contains the following notice:
"Whereas, you, J.Frost, have by force and violence taken possession of the River Thames, I hereby give you warning to quit immediately.
A.THAW.

Copies of the Lord's Prayer and several other pieces, both sacred and profane, were "worked off" at these icy printing presses, and found many willing purchasers at high prices.
On Thursday the number of booths and stalls, and also that of the visitors, was largely increased.
Swings, bookstalls, skittles, dancing booths, merry-go-rounds, sliding barges, and all the other usual appendages of Greenwich and Bartlemy Fairs, now appeared in scores.
The ice seemed to be a solid rock, and presented a truly picturesque appearance.
Friday, the 4th, brought a fresh accession of booths and of pedlars to sell their wares, and the greatest rubbish that would have long remained unsold on the land was raked up from cellars and garrets and sold at double and treble its value.
Books and toys labelled with the words "bought on the Thames" found purchasers on every side.
The Thames watermen, who, it might have been supposed, would have been ruined by the weather, their "occupation gone,” reaped a considerable harvest;for every person was made to pay a toll of twopence or threepence before he was admitted into the precincts of "Frost Fair;" and some douceur was expected besides on quitting the scene.
Indeed, some of them were said to have made as much in coppers as six pounds a day!
On this afternoon, however, there occurred an incident which warned the most venturesome that the ice was not so solid, or at all events so safe, as it appeared; for three persons, a man and two lads, being on a piece of ice just above London Bridge, the latter suddenly became detached from the main body, and was carried by the tide through one of the arches.
They laid themselves down at full length for safety, and happily were rescued by some Billingsgate fishermen.
On the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday "Frost Fair" was in full favour, and the grand walk between Blackfriars and crowded till after nightfall.
Saturday the 5th augured but badly for the "Frost Fair," for the wind veered round to the south, and there was a slight fall of snow and sleet.
The visitors, however, were not to be deterred by trifles.
Thousands again ventured on the surface, and still there was as much life and bustle as before on the frozen element; the footpath down the middle of the river was hard and secure, and amongst the crowd were some donkeys, which brought in to their owners considerable profit, as a donkey ride on the ice was charged a shilling.
These caused much merriment, as may very easily be supposed.
Towards the evening the crowd thinned very much, for the rain began to fall and the ice to crack, threatening to float away and carry off booths, donkeys, printing presses, and all the amusements of the last few days, to the no small dismay of stall keepers, shopkeepers, typographers, and (unlicensed) publicans.
The thaw, however, advanced rapidly, more rapidly indeed than heedlessness and indiscretion retreated.
Two young men ventured on the ice above Blackfriars Bridge, notwithstanding the warnings of the watermen; the mass on which they stood was carried away, and they perished.
On Sunday morning, February 6th, at an early hour the tide began to flow, and the thaw assisted the rising tide to break up the ice field.
On Monday, the thaw continuing, immense fragments of ice were in motion, floating up and down according to the set of the tide, carrying, of course, many of the barges and lighters from their moorings above bridge, and drifting them into positions where they speedily became wrecks and sunk.
In two or three days more the frozen element again became fluid, and old Father Thames, under the bright rays of the sun, relaxed his "grim visaged front," and very soon looked as cheerful and as busy as ever.

There can be little doubt, if reliance can be placed on the calculations of civil engineers, that the Thames would have been frozen over in the winter of 1838, and again in 1853, if it had not been for the removal of old London Bridge, the narrow arches of which prevented the masses of ice from escaping seaward.
The removal of this impediment has much increased what is called the "scour" of the river;and it is highly improbable that, however protracted, the frost will be able to coagulate the ice into one mass as it did, at all events, in the winters of 1564, 1608, 1634, 1683, 1715, 1739, 1789, and (as we have said above) in 1813/14.

The Thames "between bridges" in its normal and unfrozen state has been the scene of some curious experiments, wagers, &c.
For instance, Mr.John Timbs, in his "Curiosities of London," states that in July, 1776, a man safely crossed the Thames in a butcher's tray from Somerset House for a wager; upon which feat depended £14,000.
Again, towards the latter portion of his life, M.Lunardi, the first successful aëronaut in London, made several excursions on the Thames in a sort of tin life buoy, which he named a water balloon.

This invention, however, has perhaps been improved on by Captain Paul Boyton, who, in the early part of the present year of grace 1875, might be seen making his way up and down the river between Westminster Bridge and Greenwich in a very novel manner.
Dressed in an oilskin or india rubber suit of clothes, of sufficient capacity to allow of its being inflated, the captain could lie at full length on the surface of the water, or, placing himself partly in a sitting posture, propel himself comfortably along (canoe fashion) by means of a short paddle.
Captain Boyton belongs to an American organisation, entitled the "Camden and Atlantic Life Guards."
Its mission is to save, not to slay;and Captain Boyton boasts that, armoured in the uniform of his invention, he has rescued seventy one persons from the waves off the coast of New Jersey.
The waterproot suit, which weighs about fifteen pounds, is in five separate parts; that is to say, head, breast, back, and two legs; and when all are inflated, it is capable of sustaining four men in addition to the wearer.

About the year 1841 an American diver, named Scott, created some sensation by leaping from the parapet of Southwark and Waterloo Bridges into the river beneath, which was nearly full of floating ice, but the poor fellow shortly afterwards killed himself by hanging from a scaffold upon the latter bridge.

Now and then a theatrical clown navigates the river in a washing tub drawn by geese; and occasionally there are wonderful stories of sharks, porpoises, and other strange things; all "very like a whale "; leaving their ocean sire and disporting themselves "above bridge".

Sometimes, by a freak of nature, the tide in the Thames falls very low; and by a very high wind from the south west the river is occasionally blown out; or, in other words, the bed is left nearly dry from shore to shore; that many an adventurous or frolicsome wight has been known to "walk across the Thames".

Low water

As a rule, however, the tide in the Thames is generally regular in its ebb and flow, though a very strong wind from the northwest, if it comes at spring tides, causes the river to rise higher on account of the volume of water which it forces up from the Northern Ocean.
It is perhaps worthy of note that on Friday, March 20, 1874, the tide in the Thames rose 4 feet 3 inches above Trinity mark, and inundated the south bank of the river along Lambeth, Bankside, and Rotherhithe, and even as far as Woolwich, causing a considerable loss of property and at least one life.

Hunter in his "History of London" records the fact that in February, 1762, the tide overflowed the banks to such an extent that casks and other articles of merchandise were swept away from the wharves and quays, and the prison yard of the Borough compter was some inches under water, and in the next month at springtide, the water rushed in a body into Westminster Hall.
The same thing seems to have happened in the following September, when the water is said to have risen twelve feet perpendicular in five hours.
The worst effects of this high tide, it appears, were felt below bridge; the cattle being carried away, so Hunter says, in the marshes about Stratford and Bow.
"From the nearest computation, 50,000 pigs were supposed to have been lost.
Several persons lost their lives on the high road, and many machines (i.e. carriages and wagons) were overturned; houses from Bow Bridge to Stratford were all overflowed, and the inhabitants obliged to get out of their windows."
The same thing appears to have recurred in the February of the following year, and again in September, 1764.
He also tells us the tide in the Thames ebbed and flowed, in 1661, three times within seven hours, its waters being thrown into the most violent agitation.

In order to maintain the flow and "scour" of the Thames, an Act of Common Council was passed in 1538 to enforce an early statute of Henry VIII. forbidding persons to throw solid matter or refuse into the river, but allowing them to scoop out and carry away the shelves of sand, gravel, &c., as ballast, or for any other purpose, and compelling the owners to keep the banks on either side in a fit and proper state of repair.

From time to time, we may here remark, a variety of projects have been put forward having for their immediate object the improvement of the bed and course of the river both below and above London Bridge, and more than once it has been seriously proposed to dig an entirely new course, in a direct line from Lambeth to Rotherhithe; but though these plans were canvassed and agitated from time to time, the vested interests which opposed them have succeeded in carrying the day, and for a brief period the subject has fallen through, only to be again and again brought forward and as often disposed of in a similar manner.

The Victoria Embankment

The Embankment from Charing Cross Bridge

The Thames Banks in the Early Ages; Sir Christopher Wren's Plan for embanking the River; Evelyn's Suggestion with the same View; The Subject brought before Parliament by Sir F.W.Trench; Mr.James Walker's Plan; The Victoria Embankment commenced; The Work described; Land reclaimed from the Thames; The Metropolitan District Railway; Quantities of Materials used in constructing the Embankment; The Buckingham Watergate; Lines on Nelson's Column; Statue of Sir James Outram; Public Garden and Promenade; St.Stephen's Club.

Many architects and geologists, from the days of Sir Christopher Wren, have been of opinion that the Thames was formerly not a river, but an estuary, the shores of which were the hills of Camberwell and Sydenham on the south, and of Highgate and Hampstead on the north, with a large sandy plain at low water, through which the river forced its tortuous way.
Sir Christopher Wren especially considered that these sands being driven with the wind gradually formed sand; hills, which in the course of time, and by aid of Roman engineers, were embanked and so changed into meadows, or at all events into terra firma, the river being so reduced into its present channel, and wharves being built along the line of wall towards the river.
Considering that a large portion of what is commonly called London is lower in level than the high water mark in the Thames, it is clear that the river must have been embanked from a very early period.
Antiquaries have written to show that the river walls of the Thames were the work of the native British before the advent of the Romans, who, no doubt, completed the work which was already begun; and it is certain that they were not completed until a date subsequent to the Norman Conquest.
The plan proposed by Sir Christopher Wren for rebuilding of London after the Great Fire included "a commodious quay on the whole bank of the river from the Tower to Blackfriars; " but unfortunately his idea was not adopted, and the opportunity was lost for ever.
"The ingenious Mr.Evelyn," says Northouck, "suggested another plan with the same view, and besides lessening the most considerable declivities, he proposed further to employ the rubbish in filling up the shore of the Thames to low water mark in a straight line from the Tower to the Temple, and form an ample quay, if it could be done without increasing the rapidity of the stream."
ut here again the old selfish objection of "vested interests" cropped up, and defeated the scheme, which it was reserved by Providence for Lord Palmerston, during his tenure of the Premiership, to carry through Parliament and enforce upon the citizens to their very great and manifest benefit.
During the reigns of George IV. and William IV., and in the early part of Victoria, the subject of an embankment for the river from London Bridge to Westminster was brought forward in the House of Commons by the late Sir Frederick W.Trench, but still, as is too often the case, "nothing was done".
Perhaps in the event London has been fortunate, for if the work of embanking the Thames had been taken in hand in the days of our fathers or our grandfathers, it is to be feared that it would not have been carried out upon the scale of magnificence which marks the work of Sir J.W.Bazalgette.
It appears that in 1840 Mr.James Walker laid down a line of embankment for the Corporation, which has now in the main been followed.
This great work is in three divisions;
namely, the "Victoria," extending from the northern end of Blackfriars Bridge to Westminster;
the "Albert," from the Lambeth end of Westminster Bridge to Vauxhall;
and a third section extending from Millbank to the Cadogan Pier at Chelsea, close by Battersea Bridge.

The Victoria embankment, of which alone we shall treat in this chapter forms a wide and convenient line of communication between the City and the West End or more fashionable parts of London.
It was commenced in February 1864, and completed in July 1870; and a a piece of engineering skill it is second to none of the great achievements that have marked the Victorian era.
The river side footway between Westminster Bridge and the Temple was opened to the public in 1868; but at that time the completion of the carriageway was prevented by the unfinished condition of the Metropolitan District railway between Westminster and Blackfriars, and this obstacle was not removed until the end of May 1870.
On the 30th May the first passenger train passed under the embankment to the then terminal station at Blackfriars, and within six weeks from that date, the carriageway of the embankment was formed and the northern footway pathed; and the whole was thrown open to the public on 13th July in that year.
The "opening" ceremony was performed by the Prince of Wales, accompanied by Her Royal Highness Princess Louise, on behalf of Her Majesty, after whom this noble thoroughfare is named.
Following in an even line the general curve of the river, the Embankment extends from Westminster to Blackfriars Bridge, rising at each end by a gentle gradient to open upon Bridge Street, Westminster, opposite the Clock Tower of the Houses of Parliament, and upon Chatham Place, Blackfriars, opposite the station of the Metropolitan District Railway.
It passes beneath the Charing Cross Railway Bridge at Hungerford, and the first arch on the Middlesex side of Waterloo Bridge.
It is about a mile and a quarter in length, and is 100 feet in width throughout.
The carriageway is 64 feet wide; the footway on the land side 16 feet, and that on the river side 20 feet, planted with trees 20 feet apart.
On the river side the footway is bounded by a moulded granite parapet, 3 feet 6 inches in height, and on the land side partly by walls and partly by cast iron railings.
The wall of the Embankment is a work of extraordinary magnitude and solidity.
It is carried down to a depth of 32 feet below Trinity highwater mark, and 14 feet below low water; and the level of the roadway is generally four feet above high water, rising at the extremities to twenty feet.
The rising ground at each extremity is retained by the increased height of the wall, which is built throughout of brick, faced with granite, and founded in Portland cement concrete.
The river front presents a slightly concave surface, which is plain from the base to mean high water level, and is ornamented above that level by mouldings, stopped at intervals of about seventy feet by plain blocks of granite, bearing lamp standards of cast iron, and relieved on the river face by bronze lions' great heads, carrying mooring rings.
The uniformity of line is broken at intervals by massive piers of granite (intended to be surmounted with groups of statuary), which flank recesses for steamboat landing stages; and at other places by stairs projecting into the river, and intended as landing places for small craft.
The steamboat piers occur at Westminster, Charing Cross, and Waterloo Bridges, and those for small boats midway between Westminster and Charing Cross, and between the Charing Cross and Waterloo Bridges, and both are united at the Temple Pier, opposite Essex Street.

Within the recesses for the steamboat landing stages are placed admirably contrived timber platforms, which rise and fall with the tide, and which carry the lower ends of gangways that are hinged to the masonry above.
The gangways are formed of two wrought iron girders, carrying a timber platform; and they move between granite walls parallel to the general line of the roadway.
Upon the platforms there are waiting rooms for passengers.
On the land side the embankment is bounded from Westminster almost to Whitehall Place by four acres of recovered foreshore that were claimed by the Crown but now belong to the City of Westminster
A broad and commodious approach to the Embankment occurs somewhat to the south west of the Hungerford Railway Bridge, opening out of Whitehall Place.
From there to Waterloo Bridge the Embankment is bounded by a similar foreshore, amounting to nearly eight acres, and becoming gradually narrowed from west to east.
This portion is planted as an ornamental garden for the enjoyment of the public.
To the east of Waterloo Bridge is what was once the river front of Somerset House, all marked and scarred by water, and with huge mooring rings projecting from the masonry, but now quite inland.
Next comes a space behind the Temple Railway Station, communicating with Surrey Street, Norfolk Street, and Arundel Street.
Then another small portion of public ornamental garden, and then a piece added to the grounds of the Temple, but upon which the Templars will not be at liberty to build.
Lastly, there is the boundary wall separating the carriage way from the City Gas Works.
To the east of Blackfriars Bridge the line of the embankment roadway is prolonged to the Mansion House, leaving the course of the river, and forming one grand thoroughfare, known as Queen Victoria Street, between the Houses of Parliament and the City.
The eastern portion of this thoroughfare, between Cannon Street and the Mansion House, was completed and opened for public traffic in October, 1869.
The total area of the land reclaimed from the river amounts to 37 acres.
Of this, nineteen acres are occupied by the carriage and foot ways; eight acres are devoted to garden, and the rest has been conveyed to the Crown, the Templars, and other proprietors along the line.
Within the Embankment wall, and forming a portion of its structure, is placed the Low Level Intercepting Sewer, which is an integral portion of the main drainage scheme.
Above it is a subway for gas and water pipes, the dimensions of the subway being 7 feet 6 inches in height and 9 feet in width; and the diameter of the sewer varying from 7 feet 9 inches to 8 feet 3 inches.
These are both situate under the footway next the river.
The footways are paved with York stone, with granite curb.
To the East of the Temple the roadways are carried over a double covered way, belonging to the City Gas Company, and leading to a landing wharf, by which coals can be conveyed from the river without interference with the public traffic.
At this point moreover the subterranean engineering has been of extreme complexity; the sewers, the Fleet ditch, the subways, the Gas Company's railroad, the public railway, and a variety of gas, water, and telegraph pipes, being interlaced in a way that almost defies description.
In connection with the steamboat pier at Westminster Bridge a subway has been constructed, communicating with the subway already existing under Bridge Street, and affording an underground thoroughfare for foot passengers between the Houses of Parliament, the railway station, the steamboat pier, and the footways in Bridge Street and on the river and land sides of the Embankment.
The Metropolitan District Railway enters the land reclaimed by the embankment at the point between Cannon Row and Westminster Bridge, and passes under the public road as far as Charing Cross steamboat pier, where it diverges to the land side of the roadway to the Charing Cross Station, the roof of which rises above the surface and is enclosed by screen walls of brickwork.
Immediately east of the station are three openings for ventilation of the railway, which, together with the screen walls, are partially concealed by the mounds and shrubberies of the ornamental grounds.
East of the openings, the railway is carried in a covered way under the ornamental grounds as far as the Waterloo steamboat pier, where it again passes under the roadway to the Temple Station, and is thence continued on the land side of the roadway to within a few feet of Blackfriars Bridge.
From the east end of the Temple Gardens the concrete wall which retains the earth for the rising approach road to Chatham Place forms also the side wall of the railway.
The level of the rails is generally 17½ feet below the surface of the road, which is carried over the railway by castiron girders and brick arches, the upper surface of the arches being 18 inches below the surface of the road.

Mr.Peter Cunningham, writing in 1850, remarks "I cannot conclude this too brief account of our in its object, as it serves as a most effective and noble river without expressing a wish that the side sewer and terrace Embankment scheme (so long ago talked about and first projected by John Martin, the painter) may be carried out before many years are over.
By narrowing the current," he adds, "we shall recover a large quantity of waste ground on either side, and escape from the huge unhealthy mudbanks that disfigure the river about Scotland Yard.
" What would he have said had he lived to see the completion of the gigantic undertaking which forms the subject of the present chapter?
It is not easy for persons unaccustomed to deal with such matters to form any clear conception of great quantities expressed in numerical statements; but it is, nevertheless, worth while to place on record the official accounts of the cost of the work, and of the amount of various kinds of material employed in its construction.
The total cost is estimated at £1,260,000, and the purchase of property at £450,000.
The quantities of materials are stated to have been as follows: Granite, 650,000 cubic feet; brickwork, 80,000 cubic yards; concrete, 140,000 cubic yards; timber (for cofferdam, &c.), 500,000 cubic feet; caissons (for ditto), 2,500 tons; earth filling, 1,000,000 cubic yards; excavation, 144,000 cubic yards; York paving, 125,000 superficial feet; broken granite, 50,000 superficial yards.
It is but right that, in describing a work of such grandeur and national importance as the Thames Embankment, we should mention the names, not only of the principal engineer; Sir Joseph W.Bazalgette to whom, of course, it will be a monument of enduring fame, but also of those of the contractors and resident engineers; the former were Messrs. Furness, Ritson, and Webster, and the latter Messrs. Lovick and Cooper.
The Act of Parliament under which the Metropolitan Board of Works obtained powers for the formation of new streets in connection with the Thames Embankment contains in its preamble a curious reference to the Act of William and Mary "for the relief of the orphans and other creditors of the City of London".
That piece of legislation provided for the raising of a fund by the imposition of a duty on coal and wine; and subsequent enactments have continued the levy, appropriating its benefit to other requirements of metropolitan improvement.
The charges on the fund set apart for making new approaches to London Bridge having been satisfied, the residue was by this Act transferred to the purposes of the Thames Embank ment.
The Embankment, as will be seen, is treble in its object as it serves as a most effective and economic relief to our overcrowded streets by the formation of a wide thoroughfare; and not only improves the navigation of the river, but also, at the same time, has given an opportunity for making the low level sewer without disturbing the Strand or Fleet Street.
The importance of the improvement of the river is obvious to all, for not only has the Embankment added a handsome frontage to the side of the Thames, which previously had been a public eyesore, but it has also been the means of getting rid of the unequal deposits of mud in its bed, assisting the removal of the scour of the river, and consequently improving the health of the inhabitants of London.
It was found difficult for the Metropolitan Board of Works to raise capital at a less rate of interest than 4 per cent.
The importance of the work, however, had been impressed upon the ruling powers of the Government, and Parliament passed a bill by which the Board was greatly assisted in the undertaking.
Although that portion of the Embankment lying between Westminster and Waterloo Bridges is perhaps the most picturesque and varied of the whole line, that between Waterloo and Blackfriars is by no means wanting in interest and architectural effect.
For the first time we have a land view of Sir W.Chambers' beautiful building, Somerset House; whilst the neighbouring Temple Gardens, "blooming in the midst of a nest of lawyers," have gained some 200 feet in depth, and thus become, on the whole, a really handsome pleasure ground.