A complete resumé of the manners and character of the people of England might be made from the various epocha in the age of the old bridge. First, it was a crazy wooden structure, lined on each side with rows of dirty wooden huts, such as befitted a rude age, and a people just emerging from barbarism. Itinerant dealers in all kinds of goods, spread out their wares on the pathway, making a market of the thoroughfare, and blocking it up with cattle to sell, or waggon-loads of provender. The bridge, while in this primitive state, was destroyed many times by fire, and as many times built up again. Once, in the reign of William Rufus, it was carried away by a flood, and its fragments swept into the sea. The continual expense of these re

novations induced the citizens, under the superintendence of Peter of Colechurch, to build it up of stone. This was some improvement; but the houses on each side remained as poor and miserable as before, dirty outside, and pestilential within. Such was its state during the long unhappy centuries of feudalism. What a strange spectacle it must have afforded at that time!-what an emblem of all the motley characteristics of the ruled and the rulers! Wooden huts and mud floors for the people,

handsome stone chapels and oratories, adorned with pictures, statues, and stained glass, for the clergy, and drawbridges, portcullises, and all the paraphernalia of attack and defence at either end, to show a government founded upon might rather than right, and to mark the general insecurity of the times; while, to crown all, the awful gate towards Southwark, but overlooking the stream, upon which, for a period of nearly three hundred years, it was rare for the passenger to go by without seeing a human head stuck upon a pike, blackening and rotting in the sun.

The head of the noble Sir William Wallace was for many months exposed from this spot.

In 1471, after the defeat of the famous Falconbridge, who made an attack upon London, his head and nine others were stuck upon the bridge together, upon ten spears, where they remained visible to all comers, till the elements and the carrion crows had left nothing of them but the bones.

At a later period the head of the pious Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was stuck up here, along with that of the philosophic Sir Thomas More.

The legs of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the son of the well-known poet of the same name, were ex

hibited from the same spot, during the reign of Mary. Even the Mayors of London had almost as much power to kill and destroy as the Kings and Queens, so reckless was the age of the life of man. In 1335, the Mayor, one Andrew Aubrey, ordered seven skinners and fishmongers, whose only offence was rioting in the streets, aggravated by personal insult to himself, to be beheaded without form of trial. Their heads were also exposed on the bridge, and the Mayor was not called to account for his conduct. Jack Cade, in the hot fervour of his first successes, imitated this fine example, and set up Lord Saye's head at the same place, little thinking how soon his own would bear it company. The top of the gate used to be like a butcher's shambles, covered with the heads and quarters of unhappy wretches. Hentzner, the German traveller, who visited England in the reign of Elizabeth, states that, in the year 1598, he counted no less than thirty heads upon this awful gate. In an old map of the city, published in the preceding year, the heads are represented in clusters, numerous as the grapes upon a bunch! The following is a view of the gate as it appeared previous to its demolition in 1757.

How different are the glories of the new bridge. It also is adorned with human heads, but live ones, thousands at a time, passing and repassing continually to and fro. Of the millions of heads that crowd it every year, busy in making money or taking pleasure, not one dreads the executioner's knife. Every man's head is his own; and if either King or Lord Mayor dare to meddle with it, it is at his peril. We have luckily passed the age when law-makers could be law-breakers, and

every man walks in security. While these human heads adorn, no wooden hovels disfigure the new bridge, or block up the view of the water. Such a view as the one from that place was never meant to be hidden. The "unbounded Thames, that flows for all mankind," and into whose port "whole nations enter with every tide," bearing with them the wealth of either hemisphere, is a sight that only needs to be seen to be wondered at. And if there is a sight from John o' Groat's house to the Land's End of which an Englishman may be proud, it is that. Other sights which we can show to the stranger may reflect more credit upon the land, but that does honour to the men, and is unequalled among any other nation on the globe.

The history of the New Bridge is soon told. The narrowness of several of the arches of the old bridge—it contained nineteen in all-caused the tide to flow through them with a velocity extremely dangerous to small craft, and accidents were of daily occurrence. It was at first contemplated to repair the bridge and throw two or three of these small arches into one, but this idea was soon abandoned, and it was resolved to build a new one. On the 6th of June 1823, the House of Commons voted the