which belong to his own individual nature. Each brief paper, therefore, involves a partial viewpoint and a transitory, evanescent London.

And yet the successive excursions are not quite aimless, for each one of them is directed to a series of visible places and buildings which are associated with picturesque episodes from the past. Moreover, although the same ground is frequently retraced, each one has to do with an enlarging metropolis. Thus, the medieval walled town of Chaucer's day is succeeded in interest by the larger town of Shakespeare's with its outlying theaters and its interesting highway to Westminster. Thus, the coffee houses of Addison's time, the great business establishments of Lamb's, and the law courts and Houses of Parliament of Dickens's day are all features of a growing city which in the end has become the vast and complicated London of the present, fifty times the area of the original little town with which the series starts.

The London of Chaucer's day was a full-fledged city with a long history behind it. For more than a thousand years before his birth, on the spot where London now stands, the old city, or better a succession of cities had stood-an early British community, a Roman London, a deserted collection of moldering ruins, a Saxon London repeatedly occupied by the Danes, and a Norman London. From the time of the Conquest on, while the unity of the city as the chief metropolis of England was undisturbed, it may be said that physically three Londons have been erected, the dividing lines being the great fires of 1135 and of 1666. Both of these swept the heart of the old community and that part of the modern one which is technically known as "The City." Each was followed by a complete rebuilding which left many of the old thoroughfares, but completely transformed the looks of the town. It was the second of these Londons the one existing during the half millennium between the middle of the twelfth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries-in which Chaucer lived from 1340 to 1400.

This London was a little unimposing town of which

one can get a much better idea today by visiting such places as Canterbury or Oxford, than by spending a casual week in the present enormous metropolis on the Thames. Its population was probably under 40,000. It extended along the north bank of the river for about a mile and for a half mile back into the country; and even within these limits it was not solidly built up. It was completely surrounded by a wall, which on the land sides, was supplemented by what had formerly been a wide and deep moat. The south portion, of course, lay directly on the river front. At the eastern end of this was the Tower, a royal and imposing castle, nobly preserved in its main features at the present time. From here the wall circled about to the northwest, punctuated by a succession of entrances, Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, and Aldersgate. At Smithfield (the old cattle market just outside the city, half a mile back from the Thames and rather more than that distance upstream from the Tower) the wall turned in a southerly direction by Newgate and Ludgate, past St. Paul's cathedral to Blackfriars, the great Dominican monastery, and thus back to the river.

The wall itself was a sturdy pile of which the modern traveler can get an adequate notion from the fine remains at Chester, or from some of the survivors on the continent, such as for instance the almost complete one around Nuremburg. Only two fragments are still to be seen in London. The gate towers, massive structures, were part dwellings and part prisons. Above Aldgate for some years lived no less a personage than Chaucer himself. Most famous of all was Newgate, the chief prison, and scene of many a notable execution.

The "best people" had possession, for the most part, of the westerly portion of the city which the west winds freed from dust and smoke. Here certain streets even in these early days extended outside the wall, Fleet Street and the Strand reaching to Charing Cross which at that time stood in the midst of the open fields. Next, hard on the river, which made a sharp bend toward the south, came

the royal residence, Whitehall, and then Westminster, a separate community which contained both the Abbey and the Parliament buildings. At Westminster boats could carry pedestrians across to the suburb, Southwark, which otherwise was to be reached only over London Bridge a mile to the east.

As a traveler came up from Canterbury way, or, in fact, from anywhere south of the Thames, he naturally entered the city by means of this, the only bridge; and it was nearly three hundred years after Chaucer's day before, in 1760, a second was builded. The old bridge was a whole generation in erection (1176-1209), but it did duty for five full centuries. Could it have survived to the present day no single spectacle in London would now surpass it in interest. It was set on a score of stone arches of various lengths, and was intercepted about a third of the way across by a drawbridge which marked the county line between Middlesex and Surrey. Like all medieval structures of slow growth it was not irrevocably committed to a final plan before the first stone was laid, with the result that its history tells of a steady succession of changes. In its comparative youth of less than two hundred years when Chaucer was alive, it seems according to Stow, the antiquarian, not to have been "replenished with houses builded thereupon, as since it hath beene, and now is." Yet from the outset it was graced in midstream by a chapel dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury, and for the last half of its life it sturdily upheld two almost unbroken lines of shops and dwellings, together with the high towers at either end on which traitors' heads were displayed after execution. London Bridge as a name was far from telling the whole story. It was also a stronghold, a thoroughfare, and a business street; a monument to travel, commerce, law, and the church. Of all the London sights of the fourteenth century which have since been swept away there was only one other which rivaled the Bridge.

This was old St. Paul's Cathedral. Like the city itself it had risen and fallen more than once. The great structure which towered over London in the days of Henry V,begun in 1087, and about two hundred years in buildingwas completed hardly more than half a century before Chaucer's birth. It was a superb and enormous creation. The St. Paul's of today is the biggest thing in London; with the slight advantage of its position on Ludgate Hill it easily dominates the great city in the center of which it grimly rears its head; but Old St. Paul's was just about a hundred feet longer and a hundred feet taller than the present huge pile. It was far more beautiful to the eye; and it could be better seen, for it was in a smaller city, and a city of smaller buildings. We have no good view of London which displays the cathedral in the years of its greatest glory; but even in the drawings made after the steeple had burned in 1444 the great structure brooded over the town like Gibraltar at the meeting of the two seas.

Under its shadow lay an irregular network of narrow streets, all but a dozen of them terminating within the city walls; most of them lined and overhung with shops and

dwellings from two to four stories in height. These thoroughfares were ill kept by day and dark by night, even where they bordered on the homes of the rich. There was little verdure to be seen, the beauty of yard and garden being secluded behind walls as high as those which Romeo defied. And on all sides churches, over a hundred of them, crowded in so thickly that if one were to allot the city to them in parcels each could boast a parish of hardly more than a modern city block.

Volumes have been written about the more material city. These few facts are the commonplaces to be found in all London books from Stow to Baedeker. For the literary student, however, the folk of London are of more importance than a long enumeration of streets and buildings. The fourteenth century was a momentous one for all England. In point of the steps which in these hundred years made it a nation whose greatest strength was in the loyalty of its individual subjects, the experience of England