EAST LONDON, then, is a collection of new towns crammed with people; it is also a collection of industries; it is a hive of quiet, patient, humble workers; all its people live by their own labor; moreover, it is a busy port with a population of sailors, and those who belong to sailors, and those who make their livelihood out of sailors, and such as go down to the sea in ships. Its riverside is cut up with docks; in and about among the houses and the streets around the docks rise forests of masts; there is no seaport in the country, not even Portsmouth, which is so charged and laden with the atmosphere of ocean and the suggestion of things far off as this port of London and its riverside. The port and the river were here long before East London was begun. The port, however, was formerly higher up, below London Bridge. It was one of London’s sturdy mayors who bluntly reminded a king, when he threatened to take away the trade of London, that, at least, he would have to leave them the river. For, you see, while the river runs below London Bridge, it is not much harm that any king, even a mediæval monarch, can do to London trade.

And now come with me; let us walk quietly about this strange city which has so little to show except its people and their work.

We will begin with the riverside, the port and the Pool and the “hamlets” which lie beside the river.

There is one place in London where, at any time of day and all the year round, except in days of rain and snow, you may find a long line of people, men and women, boys and girls—people well dressed and people in rags, people who are halting here on their errands or their business, and people who have no work to do. They stand here side by side, leaning over the low wall, and they gaze earnestly and intently upon the river below. They do not converse with each other; there is no exchange of reflections; they stand in silence. The place is London Bridge; they lean against the wall and they look down upon the Pool—that is to say, upon the reach of the river that lies below London Bridge. I have never crossed the bridge without finding that long line of interested spectators. They are not in a hurry; they seem to have nothing to do but to look on; they are not, apparently, country visitors; they have the unmistakable stamp of London upon them, yet they never tire of the prospect before them; they tear themselves away unwillingly; they move on slowly; when one goes another takes his place. What are they thinking about? Why are they all silent? Why do they gaze so intently? What is it that attracts them? They do not look as if they were engaged in mentally restoring the vanished past; I doubt whether they know anything of any past. Perhaps their imagination is vaguely stimulated by the mere prospect of the full flood of river and by the sight of the ships. As they stand there in silence, their thoughts go forth; on wings invisible they are wafted beyond the river, beyond the ocean, to far-off lands and purple islands. At least I hope so; otherwise I do not understand why they stand there so long, and are so deeply wrapped in thought.

To those who are ignorant of the fact that London is one of the great ports of the world the sight of the Pool would not convey that knowledge. What do we see? Just below us on the left is a long, covered quay, with a crane upon it. Bales and casks are lying about. Two steamers are moored beside the quay; above them are arranged barges, three or four side by side and about a dozen in all; one is alongside the farther steamer, receiving some of her cargo; on the opposite shore there are other steamers, with a great many more barges, mostly empty; two or three tugs fight their way up against the tide; heavily laden barges with red sails, steered by long sweeps, drop down with the ebb; fishing smacks lie close inshore, convenient for Billingsgate market; there is a two-masted vessel, of the kind that used to be called a ketch, lying moored in midstream—what is she doing there?

The steamers are not the great liners; they are much smaller craft. They run between London and Hamburg, London and Antwerp, London and Dieppe. The ships which bring the treasures of the world to London port are all in the docks where they are out of sight; there is no evidence to this group of spectators from the bridge of their presence at all, or of the rich argosies they bear within them.

You should have seen this place a hundred years ago. Try to carry your imagination so far back. Before you lie the vessels in long lines moored side by side; they form regular streets, with broad waterways between; as each ship comes up-stream it is assigned its place. There are no docks; the ships receive or discharge their cargo by means of barges or lighters, of which there are thousands on the river; there are certain quays at which everything is landed, in the presence of custom-house officers, landing surveyors, and landing masters. All day long and all the year round, except on Sunday, the barges are going backward and forward, lying alongside, loading and unloading; all day long you will hear the never-ending shouting, ordering, quarreling, of the bargees and the sailors; the Pool is as full of noise as it is full of movement. Every trade and every country are represented in the Pool; the rig, the lines, the masts of every ship proclaim her nationality and the nature of her trade. There are the stately East and West Indiamen, the black collier, the brig and the brigantine and the schooner, the Dutch galliot, the three-masted Norwegian, the coaster, and the multitudinous smaller craft—the sailing barge, the oyster boat, the smack, the pinnace, the snow, the yacht, the lugger, the hog boat, the ketch, the hoy, the lighter, and the wherries, and always ships dropping down the river with the ebb, or making their slow way up the river with the flow.

Steam is a leveller by sea as well as on land; on the latter it has destroyed the picturesque stage-coach and the post-chaise and the Berlin and the family coach; by sea it banishes the old sailing craft of all kinds; one after the other they disappear; how many landsmen are there who at the present day know how to distinguish between brig and brigantine, between ketch and snow?

I said that there is no history to speak of in East London. The Pool and the port must be excepted; they are full of history, could we stop for some of it—the history of shipbuilding, the expansion of trade, the pirates of the German Ocean; when one begins to look back the things of the past arise in the mind one after the other and are acted again before one’s eyes. For instance, you have seen the Pool in 1800. Look again in 1400. The Pool is again filled with ships, but they are of strange build and mysterious rig; they are short and broad and solidly built; they are not built for speed; they are high in the poop, low in the waist, and broad in the bow; they roll before the wind, with their single mast and single sail; they are coasters laden with provisions; they are heavily built craft from Bordeaux, deep down in the water with casks of wine; they are weather-beaten ships bringing turpentine, tallow, firs, skins, from the Baltic. And see, even while we look, there come sweeping up the river the long and stately Venetian galleys, rowed by Turkish slaves, with gilded masts and painted bows. They come every year—a whole fleet of them; they put in first at Southampton; they go on to Antwerp; they cross the German Ocean again to London. Mark the pious custom of the time. It is not only the Venetian custom, but that of every country; when the ship has reached her moorings, when the anchor is dropped and the galley swings into place, the whole ship’s company gather together before the mainmast—slaves and all—and so, bareheaded, sing the Kyrielle, the hymn of praise to the Virgin, who has brought them safe to port.

Of history, indeed, there is no end. Below us is the custom house. It has always stood near the same spot. We shall see Geoffrey Chaucer, if we are lucky, walking about engaged in the duty of his office. And here we may see, perhaps, Dick Whittington, the ’prentice lad newly arrived from the country; he looks wistfully at the ships; they represent the world that he must conquer—so much he understands already; they are to become, somehow, his own ships; they are to bring home his treasures—cloth of gold and of silver, velvet, silk, spices, perfumes, choice weapons, fragrant woods; they are to make him the richest merchant in all the City; they are to enable him to entertain in his own house the King and the Queen, and to tear up the King’s bonds, amounting to a princely fortune. You may see, two hundred years later on, one Shakspere loitering about the quays; he is a young fellow, with a rustic ruddiness of countenance, like David; he is quiet and walks about by himself; he looks on and listens, but says nothing. He learns everything, the talk of sailors, soldiers, working-men—all, and he forgets nothing. Later on, again, you may see Daniel Defoe, notebook in hand, questioning the sailors from every port, but especially from the plantations of Virginia. He, too, observes everything, notes everything, and reproduces everything. As to the Pool and the port and their history one could go on forever. But the tale of London Town contains it all, and that must be told in another place.

Come back to the Pool of the eighteenth century, because it is there that we get the first glimpse of the people who lived by the shipping and the port. They were, first, the sailors themselves; next, the lightermen, stevedores, and porters; then the boat builders, barge builders, rope-makers, block-makers, ships’ carpenters, mast- and yard-makers, shipwrights, keepers of taverns and ale-houses, dealers in ships’ stores, and many others. Now, in the eighteenth century, the shipping of London port increased by leaps and bounds; in 1709 there were only five hundred and sixty ships belonging to this port; in 1740 the number was multiplied by three; this number does not include those ships which came from other British ports or from foreign ports. With this increase there was, naturally, a corresponding increase of the riverside population. Their homes were beyond and outside the jurisdiction of the City; they outgrew the inefficient county machinery for the enforcement of order and the prevention and punishment of crime. As years went on the riverside became more densely populated, and the people, left to themselves, grew year by year more lawless, more ignorant, more drunken, more savage; there never was a time, there was no other place, unless it might have been some short-lived pirate settlement on a West Indian islet, where there was so much savagery as on the riverside of London—those “hamlets” marked on my map—toward the close of the eighteenth century. When one thinks of it, when one realizes the real nature of the situation and its perils, one is amazed that we got through without a rising and a massacre.

The whole of the riverside population, including not only the bargemen and porters, but the people ashore, the dealers in drink, the shopkeepers, the dealers in marine stores, were joined and banded together in an organized system of plunder and robbery. They robbed the ships of their cargoes as they unloaded them; they robbed them of their cargoes as they brought them in the barge from the wharf to the ship. They were all concerned in it—man, woman, and child; they all looked upon the shipping as a legitimate object of plunder; there was no longer any question of conscience; there was no conscience left at all; how could there be any conscience where there was no education, no religion, not even any superstition? Of course the greatest robbers were the lightermen themselves; but the boys were sent out in light boats which pulled under the stern of the vessels, out of sight, and received small parcels of value tossed to them from the men in the ships. These men wore leathern aprons which were contrived as water-tight bags, which they could fill with rum or brandy, and they had huge pockets concealed behind the aprons which they crammed with stuff. On shore every other house was a drinking-shop and a “fence” or receiving-shop; the evenings were spent in selling the day’s robberies and drinking the proceeds. Silk, velvets, spices, rum, brandy, tobacco—everything that was brought from over the sea became the spoil of this vermin. They divided the work, they took different branches under different names, they shielded each other; if the custom-house people or the wharfingers tried to arrest one, he was protected by his companions. It was estimated in 1798 that goods to the value of £250,000 were stolen every year from the ships in the Pool by the men who worked at discharging cargo. The people grew no richer, because they sold their plunder for a song and drank up the money every day. But they had, at least, as much as they could drink.

Imagine, then, the consternation and disgust of this honest folk when they found that the ships were in future going to receive cargo and to discharge, not in the open river, but in dock, the new wet docks, capable of receiving all; that the only entrance and exit for the workmen was by a gate, at which stood half a dozen stalwart warders; that the good old leathern apron was suspected and handled; that pockets were also regarded with suspicion and were searched; and that dockers who showed bulginess in any portion of their figures were ignominiously set aside and strictly examined. No more confidence between man and man; no more respect for the dignity of the working-man. The joy, the pride, the prizes of the profession, all went out as if at one stroke. I am sorry that we have no record of the popular feeling on the riverside when it became at last understood that there was no longer any hope, that honesty had actually become compulsory. What is the worth of virtue if it is no longer voluntary? For the first time these poor injured people felt the true curse of labor. Did they hold public meetings? Did they demonstrate? Did they make processions with flags and drums? Did they call upon their fellow-workmen to turn out in their millions and protest against enforced honesty? If they did, we hear nothing of it. The riverside was unfortunately considered at that time beneath the notice of the press. After a few unfortunates had been taken at the dock gates with their aprons full of rum up to the chin; after these captives had been hauled before the magistrate, tried at the Old Bailey, without the least sympathy for old established custom, and then imprisoned and flogged with the utmost barbarity, I think that a general depression of spirits, a hitherto unknown dejection, fell upon the quarter and remained, a cloud that nothing could dispel; that the traders all became bankrupt, and that the demand for drink went down until it really seemed as if from Wapping to Blackwall the riverside was becoming sober.

Billingsgate, the great fish-market, is down below us, just beyond the first wharves and the steamers. This is one of the old harbors of London; it was formerly square in shape, an artificial port simply and easily carved out of the Thames foreshore of mud and kept from falling in by timber piles driven in on three sides. It was very easy to construct such a port in this soft foreshore; there were two others very much like this higher up the river. Of these one remains to this day, a square harbor just as it was made fifteen hundred—or was it two thousand?—years ago.

The first London Bridge, the Roman bridge built of wood, had its north end close beside this port of Billingsgate. My own theory—I will not stop to explain it, because you are not greatly interested, friendly reader, in Roman London—is that the square harbor was constructed with piles of timber on three sides and wooden quays on the piles, in order to provide a new port for Roman London when those higher up the river were rendered useless for sea-going craft by the building of the bridge. If you agree to accept this theory without question and pending the time when you may possibly take up the whole subject for yourself, you may stand with me at the head of the present stairs and see for yourself what it was like in Roman times, with half a dozen merchantmen lying moored to the wooden quays; upon them bales of wool, bundles of skins, bars of iron, waiting to be taken on board; rolls of cloth and of silk imported, boxes containing weapons, casks of wine taken out of the ships and waiting to be carried up into the citadel; in one corner, huddled together, a little crowd of disconsolate women and children going off into slavery somewhere—the Roman Empire was a big place; beside them the men, their brothers and husbands, going off to show the Roman ladies the meaning of a battle, and to kill each other, with all the grim earnestness of reality, in a sham fight for the pleasure of these gentle creatures. One does not pity gladiators; to die fighting was the happiest lot; not one of them, I am sure, ever numbered his years and lamented that he was deprived of fifty, sixty, seventy, years of life and sunshine and feasting. Perhaps—in the other world, who knows?—in the world where live the ghosts whose breath is felt at night, whose forms are seen flitting about the woods, there might be—who knows?—more battle, more feasting, more love-making.

They have now filled up most of the old port of Billingsgate, and made a convenient quay in its place. They have also put up a new market in place of the old sheds. With these improvements it is said to be now the finest fish-market in the world. Without going round the whole world to prove the superiority of Billingsgate, one would submit that it is really a very fine market indeed. Formerly it was graced by the presence of the fishwomen—those ladies celebrated in verse and in prose, who contributed a new noun to the language. The word “Billingsgate” conveys the impression of ready speech and mother-wit, speech and wit unrestrained, of rolling torrent of invective, of a rare invention in abuse, and a give-and-take of charge and repartee as quick and as dexterous as the play of single stick between two masters of defense. The fishwomen of the market enjoyed the reputation of being more skilled in this language than any other class in London. The carmen, the brewers’ draymen, the watermen, the fellowship porters were all skilled practitioners,—in fact, they all practised daily,—but none, it was acknowledged, in fullness and richness of detail, in decoration, in invention, could rise to the heights reached by the fishwomen of the market. They were as strong, also, physically, as men, even of their own class; they could wrestle and throw most men; if a visitor offended one of them she ducked him in the river; they all smoked pipes like men, and they drank rum and beer like men; they were a picturesque part of the market, presiding over their stalls. Alas! the market knows them no more. The fish-woman has been banished from the place; she lingers still in the dried-fish market opposite, but she is changed; she has lost her old superiority of language; she no longer drinks or smokes or exchanges repartee. She is sad and silent; we all have our little day; she has enjoyed her’s, and it is all over and past.

If you would see the market at its best you must visit it at five in the morning, when the day’s work begins—the place is then already crowded; you will find bustle and noise enough over the sale of such an enormous mass of fish as will help you to understand something of hungry London. Hither come all the fishmongers to buy up their daily supplies. If you try to connect this vast mass of fish with the mouths for which it is destined you will feel the same kind of bewilderment that falls upon the brain when it tries to realize the meaning of millions.

Next to Billingsgate stands the custom house, with its noble terrace overlooking the river and its stately buildings. This is the fifth or sixth custom house; the first of which we have any record, that in which Chaucer was an officer, stood a little nearer the Tower. After keeping the King’s accounts and receiving the King’s customs all day, it was pleasant for him to sit in the chamber over the Gate of Ald, where he lived, and to meditate his verses, looking down upon the crowds below.

Next to the custom house you see the Tower and Tower Hill. I once knew an American who told me that he had been in London three years and had never once gone to see even the outside of the Tower of London. There are, you see, two varieties of man—perhaps they are the principal divisions of the species. To the first belongs the man who understands and realizes that he is actually and veritably compounded of all the generations which have gone before. He is consciously the child of the ages. In his frame and figure he feels himself the descendant of the naked savage who killed his prey with a club torn from a tree; in his manners, customs, laws, institutions, and religion, he enjoys, consciously, the achievements of his ancestors; he never forgets the past from which he has sprung; he never tires of tracing the gradual changes which made the present possible; like the genealogist, he never tires of establishing a connection. I am myself one of this school. I do not know any of my ancestors by sight, nor do I know whether to look for them among the knights or among the men at arms, but I know that they were fighting at Agincourt and at Hastings, beside Henry and beside Harold. If I consider the man of old, the average man, I look in the glass. When I sit upon a jury I am reminded of that old form of trial in which a prisoner’s neighbors became his compurgators and solemnly swore that a man with such an excellent character could not possibly have done such a thing. When I hear of a ward election I remember the Ward Mote of my ancestors. I think that I belong more to the past than to the present; I would not, if I could, escape from the past.

But, then, there is that other school, whose disciples care nothing about the past. They live in the present; they work for the present, regardless of either past or future; their faces are turned ever forward; they will not look back. They use the things of the past because they are ready to hand; they would improve them if they could; they would abolish them if they got in the way of advance. They are the practical men, the administrators, the inventors, the engineers. For such men the laws of their country, their liberties, the civic peace and order which allow them to work undisturbed, all are ready made; they found them here—they do not ask how they came. If they come across any old thing and think that it is in their way, they sweep it off the earth without the least remorse; they love a new building, a new fashion, a new invention; they are the men who only see the Tower of London by accident as they go up and down the river, and they think what a noble site for warehouses is wasted by that great stone place. This is a very large school; it embraces more than the half of civilized humanity.

Let me speak in this place of the Tower to the former school—the lesser half.

Three hundred years ago Stow wrote of the Tower of London in these words: “Now to conclude in summary. The Tower is a citadel to defend or command the city, a royal palace for assemblies or treaties, a prison of state for the most dangerous offenders, the only place of coinage for all England, the armory for warlike provision, the treasury of the ornaments and jewels of the Crown, the general conserves of the most ancient records of the king’s courts of justice at Westminster.”

The history of the Tower would cover many sheets of long and gloomy pages. There is no sadder history anywhere. Fortunately, we need not tell it here. When you think of it, remember that it is still, as it always has been, a fortress; it has been in addition a palace, a court, a mint, a prison; but it has always been a fortress, and it is a fortress still; at night the gates are shut; no one after dark is admitted without the password; to the lord mayor alone, as a compliment and a voluntary act of friendliness on the part of the Crown, the password is intrusted day by day. The Tower was surrounded by a small tract of ground called the Tower Liberties. Formerly the City had no jurisdiction over this district. Even now the boundaries of the Liberties are marked out again every three years by a procession including the mayor of the Tower, the chief officials, including the gaoler with his axe of office, and the school children carrying white wands. They march from post to post; at every place where the broad arrow marks the boundary the children beat it with their wands. In former times they caught the nearest bystander and beat him on the spot, in this way impressing upon his memory, in a way not likely to be forgotten, the boundaries of the Tower Liberties. In such fashion, “by reason of thwacks,” was the barber in the “Shaving of Shagpat” made to remember the injunctions which led him to great honor. In every London parish to this day they “beat the bounds” once a year with such a procession. I know not if the custom is still preserved outside London. But I remember such a beating of the bounds, long years ago, beside Clapham Common, when the boys of the procession caught other boys, and, after bumping them against the post, slashed at them with their wands. We were the other boys, and there was a fight, which, while it lasted, was brisk and enjoyable.

There are two places belonging to the Tower which should be specially interesting to the visitor. These are the chapel, called “St. Peter ad Vincula,” and the terrace along the river. The history, my American friend, which this chapel illustrates is your property and your inheritance, as much as our own. Your ancestors, as well as ours, looked on while the people buried in the chapel were done to death. Look at those letters “A. B.” They mark the grave of the hapless Anne Boleyn, a martyr, perhaps: a child of her own bad age, perhaps—who knows? Beside her lies her sister in misfortune,—no martyr, if all is true, yet surely hapless,—Katherine Howard. Here lies the sweetest and tenderest of victims, Lady Jane Gray; you cannot read her last words without breaking down; you cannot think of her fate without tears. Here lies Sir Walter Raleigh—is there anywhere in America a monument to the memory of this illustrious man? For the rest, come here and make your own catalogue; it will recall, as Macaulay wrote, “whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame.”

The other place, the terrace along the river, is fit for the musing of a summer afternoon. In front you have life—the life of the day; behind you have life, but it is the life of the past. Nowhere in England can you find such a contrast. Sit down upon this terrace, among the old, useless cannon, among the children at play, and the contrast will presently seize you and hold you rapt and charmed.

It is also the best place for seeing the gray old fabric itself, with its ancient walls and towers of stone, its barbican, its ditch, its gates, its keep, and the modern additions in brick and wood that have grown up among the mediæval work—incongruities which still do not disfigure. On the east of the Tower a new road has been constructed as an approach to the Tower Bridge. From this road another and quite a new view can now be obtained of the Tower, which from this point reveals the number and the grouping of its buildings. I have not seen represented anywhere this new side of the Tower.

I have said nothing all this time of London’s new gate. Yet you have been looking at it from London Bridge and from the terrace. It is the new Water Gate, the noblest and most stately gate possessed by any city: the gate called the Tower Bridge. It is, briefly, a bascule bridge—that is, a bridge which parts in the middle, each arm being lifted up to open the way, like many smaller bridges in Holland and elsewhere, for a ship to pass through. It was begun in 1884 and finished in 1894.

It consists of two lofty towers communicating with either shore by a suspension bridge. There is a permanent upper bridge across the space between the towers, access being gained from the lower level by lifts. The lower bridge, on the level of the two suspension bridges, is the bascule, which is raised up by weights acting within the two towers, so as to leave the space clear.

The width of the central span is 200 feet clear; the height of the permanent bridge is 140 feet above high-water mark, and the lower bridge is 29 feet when closed. The two great piers on which the towers are built are 185 feet long and 70 feet wide; the side spans are 270 feet in the clear.

The bascule may be described as a lever turning on a pivot; the shorter, and therefore the heavier, end is within the Tower. The weight at the end of the lever is a trifle, no more than 621 tons. That of the arm, which is 100 feet long, is 424 tons. If you make a little calculation you will find that the action of one side of the pivot very nearly balances that of the other, with a slight advantage given to the longer side. You are not perhaps interested in the construction of the bridge, but you must own that there is no more splendid gate to a port and a city to which thousands of ships resort than this noble structure. The bascule swings up about seventeen times a day, but the ships are more and more going into the docks below, so that the raising of the arms is becoming every day a rarer event. It is a pleasant sight to see the huge arms rising up as lightly as if they were two deal planks, which the great ship passes through; then the arms fall back gently and noiselessly, and the traffic goes on again, the whole interruption not lasting more than a few minutes—less time than a block in Cheapside or Broadway.

Beyond the Tower are the docks named after St. Katherine. They are so named to commemorate an ancient monument and a modern act of vandalism more disgraceful perhaps than any of those many acts by which things ancient and precious have been destroyed.

On the site of those docks there stood for seven hundred years one of the most picturesque and venerable of City foundations. Here was the House called that of St. Katherine by the Tower. Its first foundress was Matilda, queen of Stephen. She created the place and endowed it, in the spirit of the time, in grief for the loss of two children who died and were buried in the Church of the Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate. Later on, Eleanor, Queen of Edward I, added certain manors to the little foundation, which had hitherto been but a cell to the Holy Trinity Priory. She appointed and endowed a master, three brethren, three sisters, the bedeswoman, and six poor clerks. Fifty years later, a third Queen, Philippa, wife of Edward III, increased the endowments. We should hardly expect this ancient foundation to survive to the present day, but it has done so. The house was spared at the Dissolution; it was considered peculiarly under the protection of the Queen consort, since three queens in succession had endowed it. Therefore, while all the other religious houses in the country were swept away this was spared; it received a Protestant form; it was called a college, a free chapel, a hospital for poor sisters. The warden, who received the greater part of the endowment, became a dignified person appointed by the Queen, the brethren and sisters remained, the bedeswoman remained, the endowment for the six poor clerks was given to make a school. The precinct became a Liberty, with its own officers, court, and prison; the buildings were retired and quiet, in appearance like a peaceful college at Cambridge; the warden’s house was commodious; the cloisters were a place for calm and meditation; there was a most beautiful church filled with monuments; there was a lovely garden, and there was a peaceful churchyard. Outside, the precinct was anything but a place of peace or quiet. It was a tangle of narrow lanes and mean streets; it was inhabited by sailors and sailor folk. Among them were the descendants of those Frenchmen who had fled across the Channel when Calais fell; one of the streets, called Hangman’s Gains, commemorated the fact in its disguise, being originally the Street of Hammes and Guisnes, two places within the English pale round Calais.

This strange place, mediæval in its appearance and its customs, continued untouched until some eighty years ago. Then—it is too terrible to think of—they actually swept the whole place away; the venerable church was destroyed; the picturesque cloister, with the old houses of sisters and of brethren, the school, the ancient court house, the churchyard, the gardens, the streets and cottages of the precinct, were all destroyed, and in their place was constructed a dock. No dock was wanted; there was plenty of room elsewhere; it was a needless, wanton act of barbarity. They built a new church, a poor thing to look at, beside Regent’s Park; they built six houses for the brethren and sisters, a large house for the warden; they founded a school, they called the new place St. Katherine’s. But it is not St. Katherine’s by the Tower, and East London has lost the one single foundation it possessed of antiquity; it has also lost the income, varying from £10,000 to £14,000 a year, which belonged to this, its only religious foundation.

In the modern chapel at Regent’s Park you may see the old monuments, the carved tombs, the stalls, the pulpit, taken from the ancient church; it is the putting of old wine into new bottles. Whenever I stand within those walls there falls upon me the memory of the last service held in the old church, when, amid the tears and lamentations of the people who loved the venerable place, the last hymn was sung, the last prayer offered, before the place was taken down.

Outside the docks begins the place they call Wapping. It used to be Wapping in the Ouze, or Wapping on the Wall. I have spoken of the embankment on the marsh. All along the river, all round the low coast of Essex stands “The Wall,” the earthwork by which the river is kept from overflowing these low grounds at high water. This wall, which was constantly getting broken down, and cost great sums of money to restore, was the cause of the first settlement of Wapping. It was in the reign of Queen Elizabeth that people were encouraged to settle here, in order that by building houses on and close to the wall this work would be strengthened and maintained.

Stow says that about the year 1560 there were no houses here at all, but that forty years later the place was occupied and thickly settled by “seafaring men and tradesmen dealing in commodities for the supply of shipping and shipmen.” If this had been all, there would have been no harm done, but the place was outside the jurisdiction of the city, and grave complaints were made that in all such suburbs a large trade was carried on in the making and selling of counterfeit goods. The arm of the law was apparently unable to act with the same vigor outside the boundaries of the lord mayor’s authority. Therefore the honest craftsman was encouraged by impunity to make counterfeit indigo, musk, saffron, cochineal, wax, nutmegs, steel and other things. “But,” says Strype, “they were bunglers in their business.” They took too many apprentices; they kept them for too short a time, and their wares were bad, even considered merely as counterfeits. The making of wooden nutmegs has been, it will be seen, unjustly attributed to New England; it was in vogue in East London so far back as the sixteenth century. The craftsmen of the City petitioned James I. on the subject; a royal commission was appointed who recommended that the City companies should receive an extension of their power and should have control of the various trades within a circle of five or six miles’ radius. Nothing, however, seems to have come of the recommendation.

Before this petition, and even in the lifetime of Queen Elizabeth, there was alarm about the growth of the suburbs; it was argued that there were too many people already; they were too crowded; there were not enough provisions for so many; if the plague came back there would be a terrible mortality, and so on. Therefore orders were issued that no new buildings should be erected within three miles of the City, and that not more than one family should live in one house. Nothing could be wiser than these ordinances. But nature is not always so wise as human legislators. It is therefore credible that children went on being born; that there continued to be marrying and giving in marriage; that the population went on increasing; and, since one cannot, even in order to obey a wise law, live in the open air, this beneficent law was set at defiance; new houses were built in all the suburbs, and if a family could not afford a house to itself it just did what it had always done—took part of a house. In the face of these difficulties East London began to create itself, and riverside London not only stretched out a long arm upon the river wall, but threw out lanes and streets to the north of the wall.

Not much of Wapping survives. The London docks cut out a huge cantle of the parish; the place has since been still further curtailed by the creation of a large recreation ground of the newest type. Some of the remaining streets retain in their name the memory of the gardens and fields of the early settlements; there is Wapping Wall, Green Bank, Rose Lane, Crabtree Lane, Old Gravel Lane, Hermitage Street, Love Lane,—no London suburb is complete without a Love Lane or a Lovers’ Walk,—Cinnamon Street: does this name recall the time of the wooden nutmegs?

Let me, at this point, introduce you to Raine’s Charity. Did you know that in our East London, as well as in the French village, we have our Rosière? The excellent Raine, who flourished during the last century, built and endowed a school for girls who were trained for domestic service; he also left money for giving, once a year, a purse containing a hundred golden sovereigns, upon her wedding day, to a girl coming from his own school who could show four years’ domestic service with unblemished character. On the occasion when I assisted at this function there was observed—I do not think that the custom has since been abolished—a quaint little ceremony. The wedding was held in the church of St. George’s-in-the-East. This church, a massive structure of stone, built a hundred and fifty years ago, stands a little off a certain famous street once called Ratcliffe Highway. They have changed its name, and shamed it into better ways. When the marriage was celebrated the church was crowded with all the girls, children, and women of the quarter. This spontaneous tribute to the domestic virtues, in a place of which so many cruel things have been alleged, caused a glow in the bosom of the stranger. Indeed, it was a curious spectacle, this intense interest in the reward of the Rosière. The women crowded the seats and filled the galleries; they thronged the great stone porch; they made a lane outside for the passage of the bridal party; they whispered eagerly, without the least sign of scoffing. When the bride, in her white dress, walked through them they gasped, they trembled, the tears came into their eyes. What did they mean—those tears?

After the service the clergyman, with the vestrymen, the bridal party, and the invited guests, marched in procession from the church through the broad churchyard at the back to the vestry hall. With the procession walked the church choir in their surplices. Arrived at the vestry hall, the choir sang an anthem composed in the last century especially for this occasion. The rector of St. George’s then delivered a short oration, congratulating the bride and exhorting the bridegroom; he then placed in the hands of the bridegroom an old-fashioned, long silk purse containing fifty sovereigns at each end. This done, cake and wine were passed round, and we drank to the health of the bride and her bridegroom. The bride, I remember, was a blushing, rosy maiden of two and twenty or so; it was a great day for her,—the one day of all her life,—but she carried herself with a becoming modesty; the bridegroom, a goodly youth, about the same age, was proposing, we understood, something creditable, something superior, in the profession of carter or carman. It is more than ten years ago. I hope that the gift of the incomparable Raine—the anthem said that he was incomparable—has brought good luck to this London Rosière and her bridegroom.

The church of St. George’s-in-the-East stands, as I have said, beside the once infamous street called the Ratcliffe Highway. It was formerly the home of Mercantile Jack when his ship was paid off. Here, where every other house was a drinking den, where there was not the slightest attempt to preserve even a show of deference to respectability, Jack and his friends drank and sang and danced and fought. Portugal Jack and Italy Jack and Lascar Jack have always been very handy with their knives, while no one interfered, and the police could only walk about in little companies of three and four. Within these houses, these windows, these doors, their fronts stained and discolored like a drunkard’s face, there lay men stark and dead after one of these affrays—the river would be their churchyard; there lay men sick unto death, with no one to look after them; and all the time, day and night, the noise of the revelry went on—for what matter a few more sick or dead? The fiddler kept it up, Jack footed it, one Jack after the other, heel and toe with folded arms, to the sailors’ hornpipe; there were girls who could dance him down, there was delectable singing, and the individual thirst was like unto the thirst of Gargantua.

The street, I say, is changed; it has now assumed a countenance of respectability, though it has not yet arrived at the full rigors, so to speak, of virtue. Still the fiddle may be heard from the frequent public house; still Mercantile Jack keeps it up, heel and toe, while his money lasts; still there are harmonic evenings and festive days, but there are changes; one may frequently, such is the degeneracy, walk down the street, now called St. George’s, without seeing a single fight, without being hustled or assaulted, without coming across a man too drunk to lift himself from the kerb. It is a lively, cheerful street, with points which an artist might find picturesque; it is growing in respectability, but it is not yet by any means so clean as it might be, and there are fragrances and perfumes lingering about its open doors and courts which other parts of London will not admit within their boundaries.

There are two squares lying north of this street; in one of them is the Swedish church, where, on a Sunday morning, you may see rows of light-haired, blue-eyed mariners listening to the sermon in their own tongue. In a corner, if you look about, you may come upon the quaintest little Jewish settlement you can possibly imagine; it is an almshouse, with a synagogue and all complete; if you are lucky you will find one of the old bedesmen to show you the place. St. George’s Street, also, rejoices in a large public garden; no street ever wanted one so badly; it is made out of the great churchyard, where dead sailors and dead bargemen and dead roysterers lie by the hundred thousand. And one must never forget Jamrack’s. This world-wide merchant imports wild beasts; in his place—call it not shop or warehouse—you will find pumas and wildcats of all kinds, jackals, foxes, wolves, and wolverines. It is a veritable Ark of Noah.

In the very heart of Wapping stands a group of early eighteenth century buildings, with which every right-minded visitor straightway falls in love; they consist of schools and a church; to these may be added the churchyard—I suppose we may say that a churchyard is built, when it is full of tombs. This sacred area is separated from the church by the road; it is surrounded by an iron railing, and within there is a little coppice of lilac, laburnum, and other shrubs and trees which have grown up between the tombs, so that in the spring and summer the monuments become half-revealed and half-concealed; the sunshine, falling on them, quivering and shifting through the light leaves and blossoms, glorifies the memorials of these dead mariners. The schools are adorned with wooden effigies of boy and girl—stiff and formal in their ancient garb; the church is not without a quiet dignity of its own, such a dignity as I have observed in the simple meeting-house of an American town. In some unexplained manner it seems exactly the sort of church which should have been built for captains, mates, quartermasters, and bo’s’uns of the mercantile marine in the days when captains wore full wigs and waistcoats down to their knees. The master boat-builder and master craftsman, in all the arts and mysteries pertaining to ships and boats, their provision and their gear, were also admitted within these holy walls. The church seems to have been built only for persons of authority; nothing under the rank of quartermaster would sit within these dignified walls. You can see the tombs of former congregations; they are solid piles of stone, signifying rank in the mercantile marine. The tombs are in the churchyard around the church, and in the churchyard on the other side of the road. As you look upon the old-fashioned church, this Georgian church, time runs back; the ancient days return: there stands in the pulpit the clergyman, in his full wig, reading his learned and doctrinal discourse in a full, rich monotone; below him sit the captains and the mates and the quartermasters, with them the master craftsman, all with wigs; the three-cornered hat is hanging on the door of the high pew; for better concentration of thought, the eyes of the honest gentlemen are closed. The ladies, however, sit upright, conscious of the Sunday best; besides, one might, in falling asleep, derange the nice balance of the “head.” When the sermon is over they all walk home in neighborly conversation to the Sunday dinner and the after-dinner bottle of port. The tombs in the churchyard belong to the time when a part of Wapping was occupied by this better class, which has long since vanished, though one or two of the houses remain. Of the baser sort who crowded all the lanes I have spoken already. They did not go to church; always on Sunday the doors stood wide open to them if they would come in, but they did not accept the invitation; they stayed outside; the church received them three times—for the christening, for the wedding, for the burial; whatever their lives have been, the church receives all alike for the funeral service, and asks no questions. After this brief term of yielding to all temptations, after their sprightly course along the primrose path, they are promised, if in the coffin one can hear, a sure and certain hope.