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extension might, he believed, be found, in the difference of the tenures by which house property was held in London to that which existed in continental cities. In these, from of old, each house was, generally speaking, a separate freehold, and was therefore piled up as high as its owner found it possible to do. In London the system of every Englishman contenting himself with "his own castle," in the form of a hired house, had grown up from the development of the system of leases, into a kind of partnership, most legitimate in its commercial advantages, between the ground landlord and the speculating builder. The natural result has been, that a competition of estate-holders has of old been created, each of them finding it to be his immediate interest to cover over his whole area with houses before some rival landowner should press into the field with some more distant estate. Thus has come into existence the mighty area cropped with low inadequate houses which composes that London, of which the veritable High Street from Notting Hill to Stratford-le-Bow is a continuous though curved line of houses, or of town-made park, some ten miles long.

With regard to the architectural department of topography, the need of a really intelligent and learned examination, such as London had not yet received, was particularly crying. To be convinced of this, they had but to consider the number of buildings of antiquarian interest which had been swept away during the course of the present century, of which he proceeded to give a long and lamentable list, including both medieval remains, and many very curious struc

tures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, almshouses, etc. To take but a few as examples: at the commencement of the nineteenth century, remains of the conventual premises of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, were still preserved, and considerable portions existed of the domestic buildings of the Savoy Palace, all of which had now been swept away; the construction of St. Katharine's Docks had involved the obliteration of the Collegiate Church and adjunct buildings of St. Katharine's as lately as 1822, the beautiful Corporation Chapel attached to Guildhall was still standing; all knew how much of Westminster Palace and of St. Stephen's Chapel, which have now perished, was revealed after the great fire of 1834; while the restoration of the choir of St. Mary Overie (or St. Saviour's, Southwark,) was followed by the total and wanton demolition of its nave, and the construction instead of the most barbarous abortion that ever pretended to be Gothic. Old London Bridge too, a most picturesque though inconvenient fragment of the Middle Ages, was still standing when William IV. ascended the throne.

He did not say that many of these demolitions were not called for by the course of modern improvement, or from the unhealthfulness of their position, or their ruinous condition; but he did say that others were wanton and barbarous, and that previously to the buildings having been pulled down, care ought to have been taken to have had them accurately planned, drawn, and described.

Those that overthrew them ought at least to have

made sure that they should leave their memorial behind them—an obligation of which, except in the case of the Palace of Westminster, they seemed totally oblivious. Now, as it was almost unnecessary to observe, that we possess that great instrument of photography, of which our fathers were ignorant, any neglect on this head would, to a tenfold greater degree, become inexcusable.

With these observations, he declared the section opened.

HISTORY OF OLD LONDON.

I.

ARCHEOLOGY IN ITS RELIGIOUS ASPECT.

A DISCOURSE,

DELIVERED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY, BY ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY, D.D., DEAN OF WESTMINSTER, JULY 22ND, 1866.

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"See what manner of stones and what buildings are here!"Mark xiii. 1.

So spoke the antiquarian architectural spirit of the first century in the midst of the most venerable and the most magnificent city of the East, even of the whole then known world. It reached back to an antiquity in the presence of which the city of the Seven Hills was a mere infant. The centre of its Temple was a relic of the Stone age of mankindthe rocky threshing-floor, with its shaggy cave, in which Araunah, the last king of the primeval race of the land, had taken refuge. Its walls, though thrice destroyed and thrice restored, contained fragments of each succeeding epoch. In Solomon's cloister, if nowhere else, were to be seen the remains of the first architecture of the Jewish nation. Its towers and fortresses were raised on the foundations laid perhaps by Melchisedek, certainly by David. It had shown the effort of the passion for

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