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Builders and Streets.

Sir John Vanbrugh' * was the architect of Blenheim, and you will recognize his name as that of one of the popular comedy writers of Queen Anne's time, who not only wrote plays, but ran a theatre which he built at the Haymarket. It was not so successful as the more famous one which stands thereabout now; the poor architect, too, had a good many buffets from the stinging Duchess of Marlborough; and some stings besides from Swift's waspish pen, which the amiable Duchess did not allow him to forget.

Another architect of these times, better worth our remembering-for his constructive abilities— was Sir Christopher Wren, who designed some forty of the church-spires now standing in London; and he also superintended the construction of the Cathedral of St. Paul's, which had been steadily growing since a date not long after the great fire

* Sir John Vanbrugh, b. (about) 1666; d. 1726. His comedies were better thought of than his buildings, both in his own day and in ours.

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-thirty-five years intervening between the laying of the foundations and the lifting of the cross to the top of the lantern. It is even said that, when he was well upon ninety, Wren supervised some of the last touches upon this noble monument to his fame.*

There was not so much smoke in London in those days the consumption of coal being much more limited and the great cross could be seen

from Notting Hill, and from the palace windows at Kensington. The Queen never abandoned this royal residence; and from the gravel road by which immediate entrance was made, stretched away the waste hunting ground, afterward converted into the grassy slopes of Hyde Park - stagnant pools and marshy thickets lying in place of what is now the Serpentine. People living at Reading in that day whence ladies now come in for a morning's shopping and back to lunch-did then, in seasons of heaviest travelling, put two days to the journey;

* Sir Christopher Wren, b. 1631; d. 1723. The cathedral was begun in 1675, and virtually finished in 1710, though there may have been many "last touches" for the aged architect.

and joined teams, and joined forces and outriders, to make good security against the highwaymen that infested the great roads leading from that direction into the town. Queen Anne herself was beset and robbed near to Kew shortly before she came to the throne; and along Edgeware Road, where are now long lines of haberdasher shops, and miles of gas-lamps, were gibbets, on which the captured and executed highwaymen were hung up in warning.

John Gay.

Some of these highwaymen were hung up in literature too, and made a figure there; but not, I suspect, in way of warning. It was the witty Dean Swift who suggested to the brisk and frolicsome poet, John Gay, that these gentlemen of the highroad would come well into a pastoral or a comedy; and out of that suggestion came, some years later, "The Beggar's Opera," with Captain Macheath for a hero, that took the town by storm ran for sixty and more successive nights, and put its musical, saucy songlets afloat in all the purlieus of London. It was, indeed, the great forerunner of our ballad

operas; much fuller, indeed, of grime and foul strokes than Mr. Gilbert's contagious sing-song; but possessing very much of his briskness and quaint turns of thought, and of that pretty shimmer of language which lends itself to melody as easily as the thrushes do.

This John Gay-whose name literary-mongers will come upon in their anthologies was an alert, well-looking young fellow, who had come out of Devonshire to make his way in a silk-mercer's shop in London. He speedily left the silk-mercer's; but he had that about him of joyousness and amiability, added to a clever but small literary faculty, which won the consideration of helpful friends; and he never lost friends by his antagonisms or his moodiness. Everybody seemed to love to say a good word for John Gay. Swift was almost kind to him; and said he was born to be always twenty-two, and no older. Pope befriended and commended him; great ladies petted him; and neither Swift nor Pope were jealous of a petting to such as Gay; his range was amongst the daisies

* John Gay, b. 1685; d. 1732.

- and theirs above the tree-tops.

In

A little de scriptive poem of his, called Trivia, brings before us the London streets of that day the coaches, the boot-blacks, the red-heeled cavaliers, the bookstalls, the markets, the school-boys, the mud, the swinging sign-boards, and the tavern-doors. the course of it he gives a score or more of lines to a description of the phenomena of the solidly frozen Thames-sharply remembered by a good many living in his time with booths all along the river, and bullocks cooked upon the frozen roads which bridged the water; and he tells of an old apple-woman, who somehow had her head lopped off when the break-up came, and the icecakes piled above the level- tells it, too, in a very Gilbert-like way, as you shall see :

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"She now a basket bore;

That head alas! shall basket bear no more!
Each booth she frequent past, in quest of gain,
And boys with pleasure heard her thrilling strain.

"O roving muse! recall that wondrous year,
When hoary Thames, with frosted osiers crown'd,
Was three long moons in icy fetters bound."

The allusion is doubtless to the year 1684, famous for its exceeding cold.

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