The docks in London which have the privilege, of legal quays, and are places of “special security," are capable of receiving in their warehouses and other places for stores about 500,000 tons of merchandise, which are placed in bond under the inspection and care of officers of the revenue, and the duty need not be paid until the goods are taken out for home consumption. These advantages render London a free port, and, without them, its character as a great entrepôt for the produce of the world could not be maintained. The gradual extension of the warehousing system is one of the most important commercial reforms of the present century. Previous to 1804, that is, before there were any docks, the duties on almost every species of merchandise were paid when imported, a drawback to the amount being allowed on re-exportation. Besides raising prices, this system encouraged frauds on the revenue, by which fortunes were dishonestly realised. On the opening of the West India Docks the produce of the West Indies was admitted at those docks without the payment of duty being required at the time; and, when the London Docks were opened, rice, tobacco, wine, and spirits were admitted there also on the same terms. Until the out-ports obtained warehouses of equal security, London enjoyed advantages which have since been partially extended to all the ports of any consideration.

Before passing to the other side of the river, we must notice the Regent's Canal Dock, between Shadwell and Limehouse; and, though it is a place for bonding timber and deals only, it affords great accommodation to the trade of the port by withdrawing shipping from the river.

The docks on the southern banks of the Thames are-1. The Grand Surrey Canal Dock at Rotherhithe, about two miles from London Bridge by water. 2. The Commercial Docks and Timber Ponds. 3. The East Country Dock. These have only the privilege of sufferance wharfs. At the two latter docks timber, corn, hemp, flax, tallow, and other articles, which pay a small duty and are of a bulky nature, remain in bond, and the surrounding warehouses are chiefly used as granaries, the timber remaining afloat in the dock until it is conveyed to the yards of the wholesale dealer and the builder. The Surrey Dock, like the Regent's Dock, is merely an entrance basin to a canal, and can accommodate 300 vessels: the warehouses, chiefly granaries, will not contain more than 4000 tons of goods. The Commercial Docks, a little lower down the river, occupy an area of about forty-nine acres, of which four-fifths are water; and there is accommodation for 350 ships, and in the warehouses for 50,000 tons of merchandise. They were used originally for the shipping employed in the Greenland fishery, and provided with the necessary apparatus for boiling blubber; but, the whale fishery being given up, the docks were, about the year 1807, appropriated to vessels engaged in the European timber and corn trades, and ranges of granaries were built. The East Country Dock, which adjoins the Commercial Docks on the south, is capable of receiving twenty-eight timber ships, and was constructed about the same period for like purposes. It has an area of six acres and a half, and warehouse-room for 3700 tons.

Notwithstanding this ample dock accommodation, it will probably at some time be still further extended by the formation of collier docks, as none of the existing docks admit colliers to discharge their cargoes, in consequence of the

injury which would be done to most articles of merchandise by coal-dust. The number of colliers which entered the river in 1790 was 3897; and in 1841, 10,311, so that their increase has more than filled up the vacancies occasioned by the operation of the docks in withdrawing shipping from the overcrowded river, besides which steam navigation has been greatly extended, demanding a larger space for free and unobstructed passage. The formation of a harbour on the Essex side of the river, with a railway for the conveyance of coal to London, is another mode by which it is proposed to prevent the resort of colliers in the most crowded parts of the river. Again, steam navigation was so comparatively unimportant even at the time of the construction of the St. Katherine's Docks, that it is scarcely a matter of surprise that none of the docks are calculated for steamers of the largest class without the paddle-wheels being taken off; and yet vessels of this description are gradually obtaining possession of a trade formerly employing sailing vessels of comparatively small burthen. Between London and Hamburgh, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Ostend, Calais, Boulogne, Havre, Oporto, Lisbon, and even the Mediterranean, they already are large carriers of every kind of merchandise, and, as they do not enter docks, but discharge their cargoes while lying in the river, they necessarily occupy a large part of the stream. One of the chief objections to the accommodation of steam-vessels in the docks is the risk from fire.

LVI.-WESTMINSTER BRIDGE.

THE metropolitan world of the present and the latter half of the last century seems to have been seized with a very sudden and sweeping determination to get rid of a variety of circumstances which however annoying or mischievous in themselves, had been borne most patiently by our forefathers from time immemorial. It is truly surprising to walk through the principal thoroughfares of London and mark how entirely everything in the shape of street magnificence, street cleanliness, or street comfort that meets the eye, belongs to the existing or the preceding generation. Let accident or necessity take us where innovation has not yet appeared,-to any of those spots or districts, growing smaller and fewer every day, which yet preserve for our instruction a few glimpses of the overhanging houses, the alley-like streets, the din, the danger, and the filth surrounding the whole like another atmosphere, which so recently characterised London generally, and it seems difficult to understand how senses of vision, hearing, or smell, constituted like our own, could have ever regarded such nuisances with complacency. It may be supposed that only the poorer and less prominent neighbourhoods or thoroughfares were of this kind: so far, however, was this from being the case, that the highway to, and precincts of, the chief courts of justice, of the houses of legislature, and of the great Abbey, the foremost objects of attention to all foreign visitors, the constant places of resort of all the most distinguished Englishmen, were but a century ago in a condition

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which we should say St. Giles's or Bethnal Green now but faintly emulates. Our evidence will satisfy the most incredulous. On the 27th of January, 1741, Lord Tyrconnel, in moving "for leave to bring in a bill for the better paving and cleansing the streets within the city of Westminster and the liberties thereof, and for preventing nuisances therein," said, "It is impossible, Sir, to come to this assembly, or to return from it, without observations on the present condition of the streets of Westminster-observations forced on every man, however inattentive, or however engrossed by reflections of a different kind. . . . . The filth, Sir, of some parts of the town, and the inequality and ruggedness of others, cannot but in the eyes of foreigners disgrace our nation and incline them to imagine us a people not only without delicacy but without government—a herd of barbarians or a colony of Hottentots." From other notices also we learn that the Houses of Parliament were obliged, from session to session, to publish an order for the keeping clear the way for the members;* and that when the Monarch came by land to visit them it was necessary to throw fagots into the ruts to enable the unwieldy vehicle of state to pass along with moderate ease. Who that now passes from Charing Cross into Westminster would suspect he was traversing the very localities which Lord Tyrconnel had in view in his description? And the reformation of the evils more particularly referred to by the noble lord, connected with the surface of the ground, is but a type of the greater changes that have here been wrought. Let us imagine ourselves following some foreign visitor from the City to Westminster a century ago. As soon as he turned the corner at Charing Cross he entered a narrow street occupying the right side only of the space now forming Whitehall and Parliament Street, and which, nowhere very broad, measured in some parts scarce eighteen feet. Continuing his route between the walls of Whitehall on the left and the Park on the right, near the Horse Guards he stopped to admire the stately proportions of the Banqueting House, almost the only part of the famous Palace which the fire of 1697 had left entire; or to take a last look of Holbein's beautiful gate, which he would hear was likely before long to be removed-the one loss among all the buildings and places to be swept away. Thinking of this gate, he would care little for the absence of the other, also belonging to Whitehall, which had stood but a few years before at the corner of King Street and Downing Street, and over which Henry VIII. had been accustomed to pass from the chambers of the Palace to regale himself with the pleasures of his tennis-court, his bowling-green, his cock-pit, or his tilt-yard, or merely with a simple walk in the Park. As the stranger passed along King Street (presenting here and there to this day the same aspect as of old) he had reason to be thankful if he got safely through without injury to person or apparel from the confused throng of pedestrians, horsemen, carts, and coaches jammed together in that narrow space; still more fortunate was he if some occasion of public ceremony, such as the King going to open parliament, had not drawn him thither. It makes one's sides ache to think of being borne along with such a procession through such a place. Forgetting for a moment the disagreeables of the way and the astonishment they bred in him, he would find the neighbourhood an interesting one. Near the end of King Street (which then extended to some little distance on the other side of the

*This form is, indeed, still retained.

present Great George Street, which was not yet in existence) he beheld the place rejoicing in the name of Thieving Lane, through which felons had been formerly conducted (somewhat circuitously, in order to avoid touching the Sanctuary of the Abbey, where they must have been freed) to the Gate-house or Prison of the Abbot of Westminster, standing just by the beginning of Tothill Street; and close by was the famous Sanctuary itself, occupying the space where now stands the Sessions House. From King Street the road to the Abbey and the houses of Parliament diverged to the left towards the Thames; but then, again turning to the right, passed between New Palace Yard and the old decaying houses which stood on that pleasant green sward we now see opposite the former, with the statue of Canning conspicuous in front. This part was called St. Margaret's Lane, and a lane truly it was, hemmed in closely by the old " Fish-yard" and by parts of the ancient Palace of Westminster, where, among other curiosities about shortly to disappear, our visitor would see two old prisons of the regal habitation, known respectively as Heaven and Purgatory, in the last of which "was preserved the ducking-stool which was employed by the burgesses of Westminster for the punishment of scolds. The lady," he would be informed, if he was curious in such matters, "was strapped within a chair fastened by an iron pin or pivot, at one end of a long pole, suspended on its middle by a lofty trestle, which, having been previously placed on the shore of the river, allowed the body of the culprit to be plunged hissing hot into the Thames.' When the fervour of her passion was supposed to have subsided by a few admonitory duckings, the lever was balanced by pulling a cord at the other end, and the dripping Xantippe was exposed to the ridicule of her neighbours." The dif ferent buildings we have mentioned rendered St. Margaret's Lane so narrow that it has been thought worthy of note that palisades became absolutely necessary between the footpath and the roadway for the safety of passengers. And when -strange contrast of magnificence and meanness!-the royal vehicle with its eight gorgeously caparisoned horses floundered along this miserable road, it had, after setting down the king at the entrance to the House of Lords, to drive into the court-yard of Lindsey or Abingdon House, then standing at the west corner of Dirty Lane (now Abingdon Street), in order to be able to turn. Wherever the visiter looked it was the same. The beautiful architecture of Henry VII.'s Chapel required an effort in order to get to see it; and Westminster Hall was in a still worse condition, some of the niches of the lower part of its front being hidden behind public-housest and coffee-houses, which were propped up by it, and which but for its support would have spared all trouble of taking down. The gate of the Woolstaple opposite the Hall, the last remains of the establishment to which old Westminster owed so much, he would be too late to see, as it had lately (in 1741) been removed-and noticeable was the occasion of that removal. The last relic of the old monopolising principles of business, which confined certain advantages to certain places, was displaced to make room for a structure which, long desired, was at last only achieved by a triumph over similar principles, and which was to open to Westminster a new career of imSmith's 'Antiquities of Westminster,' vol. i. p. 262.

The two public-houses which concealed some portion of the Hall were only removed in the beginning of the present century, when the fragments of eight figures, in niches of exquisite workmanship, were discovered.