But in the reign of Edward I. the vintners complained that they could neither “sell their wines, although paying poundage, neither hire houses nor cellars to lay them in." In consequence, that monarch ordered redress to be given, and houses were built for the merchants' accommodation, with vaults, &c., for the stowage of their wines. To make room for them a characteristic feature of very old London was swept away. "There is in London," says Fitzstephen," upon the river's bank, a public place of cookery, between the ships laden with wine, and the wines laid up in cellars to be sold. There ye may call for any dish of meat, roast, fried, or sodden, fish both small and great, ordinary flesh for the poorer sort, and more dainty for the rich, as venison and fowl. If friends come on a sudden, wearied with travel, to a citizen's house, and they be loth to wait for curious preparations and dressings of fresh meat, the servants give them water to wash, and bread to stay their stomach, and in the mean time go to the water-side, where all things are at hand answerable for their desire. Whatsoever multitude, either of soldiers or other strangers, enter into the city at any hour, day or night, or else are about to depart, they may turn in, bait there, and refresh themselves to their content, and so avoid long fasting, and not go away without their dinner. If any desire to fit their dainty tooth, they need not to long for the accipenser, or any other bird; no, not the rare Godwit of Ionia. This public victualling place is very convenient, and belongs to the city." The vintners, however, proved too powerful for the cooks, and so the latter had to leave the field to their antagonists. The original name of Queenhithe was Edred's hithe (i. e. Edred's harbour). Formerly ships were brought up thus far to discharge their cargoes, London Bridge having a drawbridge which opened to allow them to pass. The name Queen's hithe is supposed to be derived from Henry III. having given its profits to his spouse, and at the same time the ships of the cinque ports were compelled to bring their corn thenceforward only to this place.

The bridge was begun on the 23rd of September, 1814, and the first stone of the south pier laid by Lord Keith on the 23rd of May, 1815, who, with the other gentlemen of the committee of management, partook of a cold collation on a temporary bridge erected on the works. The whole was finished in less than five years, and was opened, without any particular ceremony, at midnight (the bridge being brilliantly lighted with gas) in April, 1819. As an iron bridge this is confessedly without a rival. The arches are, for instance, the largest in existence, the centre one having a span of 240 feet, and each of the two side ones measuring 210 feet. The arch of the famous bridge at Sunderland has a span very nearly equal to this centre arch, but still it is less. As we now pass beneath this gigantic semicircle, and gaze upward upon the great iron-ribbed framework which supports it, one feels half unconsciously inclined to fancy Cyclopean hands must have been here at work. But the engineer, in the sublimity of his views, smiles at our wonder, and reminds us that Telford had previously proposed to erect a bridge at this spot with one arch only: "the force of wonder can no farther go;" we do not know, in these days, what we may venture to disbelieve. With the exception of

Translation-Stow's Survey, p. 711.

the piers and the abutments, the whole of Southwark Bridge is of cast iron. The preparing the foundations was a work of unusual magnitude and expense, on account of the extraordinary dimensions of the arches; of still greater difficulty and importance was the business of casting the superstructure, which took place at the iron-works of Messrs. Walker and Co., Rotherham, Yorkshire. Many of the solid pieces of casting weighed ten tons. There are eight great ribs, from six to eight feet deep, riveted to diagonal braces, in each arch; and the height of the centre arch above low water is 55 feet. The entire weight of iron is about 5,780 tons. In building the bridge a mistake was committed that might have been attended with serious consequences, if timely discovery had not been made. To prevent the natural expansion of the metal with heat, some of the most important joinings of different parts of the work were tightly wedged with iron wedges. But as, in fact, nothing could prevent expansion under the operation of heat, it was found that a very unequal strain was produced, tending to the fracture of the entire bridge. The masons were accordingly employed night and day till the wedges were removed. Having mentioned this oversight, it is but proper to state that the accuracy of the work generally was most surprising. The centre arch sunk at the vortex, on removing the timber framework, just one inch seveneighths, and that was all.

The erection of the bridge was followed, as in all the previous instances, by rapid and extensive changes in the neighbourhood, though, in the case of Southwark, these were confined chiefly to the Surrey side. The character of this part may be gathered, in some degree, from the notices we have given of the chief features of the place, the bear-gardens, brothels, &c.; and it need not, therefore, excite any surprise to find the extensive district, reaching from Bankside to the King's Bench, described, before the bridge was built, as covered with "miserable streets and alleys." Many of these, indeed, yet remain, but the carrying that fine road from the foot of the bridge direct to the Elephant and Castle has greatly improved the aspect and prosperity of the district.

In reviewing generally the collateral effects of the erection of the bridges of London, we are more particularly struck with what they have done for that part of the metropolis which lies on the opposite shore. If we remember the great branches they have sent out, Westminster Bridge Road, Waterloo Road, Great Surrey Street, and Southwark Bridge Road, and each again putting forth a new system of offshoots; if we remember that St. George's Fields were fields in the middle of the last century, and Lambeth Marsh a marsh even at the commencement of the present; or, in a word, if we remember that the extensive districts comprised within the boundaries of Southwark and Lambeth were, before the erection of these edifices, little better than a scattered assemblage of lanes and isolated houses and gardens, whilst now they form, with the parts adjacent, one dense, continuous, and prosperous town, which may be said to have Battersea on one side, and Greenwich for the other, for its proper limits, we shall have then some idea of the extrinsic, as well as of the intrinsic, greatness of the metropolitan bridges.

We conclude with the following document, for which we are mainly in

debted to Messrs. Britton and Pugin's work on the Public Buildings of London :

TABULAR VIEW OF THE BRIDGES OF LONDON, Showing their extreme Length from bank to bank, their extreme Width, their Height from low water to the top of the parapet, their number of Arches and Span of Central Arch, their Materials, times of Commencement and Completion, the Names of their Architects, the surface of Waterway between the piers, and the extent of Space occupied by the piers in the width of the river.

AMONG the types of an earlier time, now daily disappearing from our gaze, there is one feature of our old English streets which deserves at least a word of respectful recollection at parting. Who has not in childhood gazed on that long, gaily-striped, mystic-looking wand-let us not here debase it by associations that have so often injured its dignity, let us not call it pole-fixed over certain wellknown places in his neighbourhood, and wondered what could be its use or meaning? We have yet visions before us of an old Elizabethan mansion in an antique corner of one of the most antique-looking towns in England, with projecting stories supported by strange monsters in fine old black carving, one of which a huge piece of workmanship-seemed ever to brandish one of these awful instruments over the heads of all who approached the mysterious-looking precincts. We cannot to this day dispel the fancy that in that uncouth, grinning shape we beheld a kind of deposed household divinity of the once-flourishing Company of Barber-Surgeons-a lar fallen from its high estate, and driven into that remote solitude. Yes, these characteristic features of our old streets are

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N

passing away, and in one sense the circumstance is to be regretted. They are the last popular symbols of the low state, even in very recent times, of a science which peculiarly affects the people's welfare; and might yet be a warning against a belief, by no means extinct, that surgery and physic, like reading and writing, "come by nature." Few readers but will remember that the existing pole is an imitation of the one formerly held in the hands of patients during bleeding, and the stripes represent the tape or bandages used for fastening the arm, whilst both pole and tape, as soon as done with, were again hung up outside the shop, to tempt passers-by to an operation they were by no means reluctant to, as being a generally favourite specific for all disorders. We hope the ghosts of those days were not of a revengeful nature, or the ancient Barber-Surgeons of this class must have had a weary time of it, considering the number of persons they must have prematurely dismissed with their terrible poles, and tapes, and

basins.

With the poles, too, the "name" of the Barber-Surgeons is in process of extinction, but not so their "local habitation:" that yet remains, and a curious and interesting place it is. Among those narrow streets and alleys which surround the Post-Office, to the north and the east, is one, in the former direction, called Monkwell Street. Remembering to have met with the same street under the less euphonious appellation of Mugwell Street, in the books of the Company, under the date of sixteen hundred odd, we had suspicions that the alteration, suggestive of monasteries, and shaved heads, and cool and quiet cloisters, was not altogether a fair one; but it appears from Stow that the present is but a restoration of the original appellation, which was derived from a hermitage or chapel of St. James in the Wall," inhabited by a hermit and two chaplains belonging to the Cistercian Abbey of Garadon. "Of these monks, and a well pertaining to them, the street took that name." And in Monkwell Street is the Hall of the Barbers' (formerly the Barber-Surgeons') Company. The conjunction which now seems so strange to us, may be dated, it appears, from the custom which prevailed among the monks and Jews-almost the only practitioners of the healing art during the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries-of employing barbers to assist in the baths, in applying ointments, and in various other surgical operations; and, as to surgery in particular, after the prohibition of the clergy, in 1163, from undertaking any operation involving bloodshed, the art fell into the hands of the barbers and smiths, but chiefly into those of the former. The first step towards combining this now important body into a united and chartered Company was taken by Thomas Morestede, surgeon to the three Henries, the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth. A record in the 'Foedera' gives us an interesting glimpse into the state of surgery during Morestede's time. It appears that in Henry V.'s army (the army of Agincourt) there was but one surgeon present at a certain period-Morestede himself:-his fifteen assistants, whom he had pressed under a royal warrant, not having yet landed. The scientific attainments of these assistants were not, we may be sure, very extraordinary, when we find that three of them were to act as archers as well as surgeons, that the whole fifteen received only archers' pay, and Morestede only the pay of an ordinary man-of-arms. But in surgery, as in physic, alchemy was the grand storehouse of all the secrets men