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cation between one part of London and another, and between London and Westminster, was constantly increasing. A portion of London Bridge was moveable, which enabled vessels of burden to pass up the river to unload at Queenhithe and other wharfs. Stairs (called bridges) and Watergates studded the shores of both cities. Palaces arose, such as the Savoy, where the powerful nobles kept almost regal state. The Courts of Law were fixed at Westminster; and thither the citizens and strangers from the country daily resorted, preferring the easy highway of the Thames to the almost impassable road that led from Westminster to the village of Charing, and onward to London. John Lydgate, who wrote in the time of Henry V., has left us a very curious poem, entitled 'London Lyckpeny.' He gives us a picture of his coming to London to obtain legal redress of some grievance, but without money to pursue his suit. Upon quitting Westminster Hall, he says,

"Then to Westminster Gate I presently went.'

This is undoubtedly the Water-gate; and, without describing anything beyond the cooks, whom he found busy with their bread and beef at the gate, "when the sun was at high prime," he adds,

"Then unto London I did me hie."

By water he no doubt went, for through Charing he would have made a day's journey. Wanting money, he has no choice but to return to the

country; and having to go "into Kent," he applies to the watermen at Billingsgate:

"Then hied I me to Billingsgate,

And one cried hoo-go we hence:
I pray'd a bargeman, for God's sake,
That he would spare me my expense.

Thou scap'st not here, quoth he, under two pence."

We have a corroboration of the accuracy of this picture in Lambarde's 'Perambulation of Kent.' The old topographer informs us that in the time of Richard II. the inhabitants of Milton and Gravesend agreed to carry in their boats, from London to Gravesend, a passenger, with his truss or farthell, for two-pence.

The poor Kentish suitor, without two-pence in his pocket to pay the Gravesend bargeman, takes his solitary way on foot homeward The gate where he was welcomed with the cry of hoo-ho, ahoy-was the great landing-place of the coastingvessels; and the king here anciently took his toll upon imports and exports. The Kentishman comes to Billingsgate from Cornhill; but it was not an uncommon thing for boats, even in those times, to accomplish the feat of passing through the fall occasioned by the narrowness of the arches of London Bridge; and the loss of life in these adventures was not an unfrequent occurrence. Gifford, in a note upon a passage in Ben Jonson's Staple of News,' says somewhat pettishly of the old bridge, "had an alderman or a turtle been lost there, the nuisance would have been long

since removed." A greater man than an alderman-John Mowbray, the second Duke of Norfolk -nearly perished there in 1428. But there were landing-places in abundance between Westminster and London Bridge, so that a danger such as this was not necessary to be incurred. When the unfortunate Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, was condemned to do penance in London in three open places, on three several days, she was brought by water from Westminster; and on the 13th November, 1440, was put on shore at the Temple bridge; on the 15th, at the Old Swan; and, on the 17th, at Queenhithe. Here, exactly four centuries ago, we have the same stairs described by the same names as we find at the present day. The Old Swan (close to London Bridge) was the Old Swan in the time of Henry VI., as it continued to be in the time of Elizabeth. If we turn to the earliest maps of London we find, in the same way, Broken Wharf, and Paul's Wharf, and Essex Stairs, and Whitehall Stairs. The abidingplaces of the watermen appear to have been as unchanging as their thoroughfare-the same river ever gliding, and the same inlets from that broad and cheerful highway to the narrow and gloomy

streets.

The watermen of London, like every other class of the people, were once musical; and their "oars kept time" to many a harmony, which, if not so poetical as the song of the gondoliers, was full of the heart of merry England. The old city chro

nicler, Fabyan, tells us that John Norman, Mayor of London (he held this dignity in 1454), was "the first of all mayors who brake that ancient and old-continued custom of riding to Westminster upon the morrow of Simon and Jude's day." John Norman "was rowed thither by water, for the which the waterman made of him a roundel, or song, to his great praise, the which began

'Row the boat, Norman, row to thy leman.""

The watermen's ancient chorus, as we collect from old ballads, was

man." *

"Heave and how, rumbelow;"

and their burden was still the same in the time of Henry VIII., not forgetting, "Row the boat, NorWell might the first mayor who carried the pomp of the city to the great Thames, and made

"The barge he sat in, like a burnish'd throne,

Burn on the water."

deserve the praises of watermen in all time! We could willingly spare many more intrinsically valu able things than the city water-pageant; for it takes us even now into the old forms of life; and if it shows us more than all other pageants something of the perishableness of power and dignity, it has a fine antique grandeur about it, and tells us that London, and what belongs to London, are not of yesterday.

* Skelton.

We every now and then turn up in the old Chronicles, and Memoirs, and Letters that have been rescued from mice and mildew, some graphic description of the use of the river as the common highway of London. These old writers were noble hands at scene-painting. What a picture Hall gives us of the populousness of the Thames !-the perfect contrast to Wordsworth's

"The river glideth at his own sweet will"

in the story which he tells us of the Archbishop of York, after leaving the widow of Edward IV. in the sanctuary of Westminster, sitting "alone below on the rushes, all desolate and dismayed," returning home to York Place in the dawning of the day; and when he opened his windows and looked on the Thames, he might see the river full of boats of the Duke of Gloucester his servants, watching that no person should go to sanctuary, nor none should pass unsearched." Cavendish, in his 'Life of Wolsey,' furnishes as graphic a description of the great Cardinal hurrying to and fro on the highway of the Thames, between his imperious master and the injured Katharine, when Henry had become impatient of the tedious conferences of the Court at Blackfriars sitting on the question of his divorce, and desired to throw down with the strong hand the barriers that kept him from the Lady Anne:-"Thus this court passed from session to session, and day to day, in so much that a certain day the King sent for my lord at the