Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE CITY AND EAST END Oh ! Loudon won't be London long, For 'twill be all pulled down, And I shall sing a funeral song O'er that time-honoured town. W. Maoinn. Our way now lies over London Bridge, and while crossing the river into the City the opportunity should not be lost of glancing at a few of Wren's beautiful steeples, one of the finest being here the most conspicuous, namely, that of St. Magnus which, be it remembered, stood more or less in a line with old London Bridge. The pathway for foot-passengers which formed part of the road leading straight to the bridge passed through the existing open passage under the tower. What we now call the City once comprised the whole of London, and it is a remarkable fact that the site of the Roman walls, of which traces stillexist, continue to this day to be the limitations of what is, strictly speaking, the City, though districts " without" the walls have from time to time been added. The Great Fire of London swept away five-sixths of the older City, and time and the jerry-builder have almost completed the removal of the rest. But the Fire occurred many generations ago, and the structures erected within fifty years of that event have now a respectable antiquity. The three kinds of building to which, perhaps, the student of old London would first direct his steps in the City are the churches dating from before the Great Fire, St. Paul's Cathedral and the parish churches designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and thirdly, the Guildhall, together with some twenty halls of the City Companies, the rest of these being modern. Externally the Guildhall shows few traces of antiquity, but the interior of the fifteenth-century porch has considerable merit, and the large crypt is a remarkably interesting specimen of media...