ke out much
about it and went to bed again, but when he rose at seven o'clock it was
still burning, so he left his house and made his way to the Tower, from
whence he saw London Bridge aflame, and describes how the poor pigeons,
loth to leave their homes, fluttered about the balconies, until with
singed wings they fell into the flames. After gazing his fill he went to
Whitehall and had an interview with the king, who at once ordered his
barge and proceeded downstream to his burning City, and to the
assistance of a distracted Lord Mayor.

The fire raged four days, and made an end of old London, a picturesque
and even beautiful City. St. Paul's, both the church and the school, the
Royal Exchange, Ludgate, Fleet Street as far as the Inner Temple, were
by the 7th of the month smoking ruins. Four hundred streets, eighty-nine
churches (just a church an hour, so the curious noted), warehouses
unnumbered with all their varied contents, whole editions of books,
valuable and the reverse of valuable, were wiped out of existence. Rents
to an enormous amount ceased to be represented any longer by the houses
that paid them. How was the king to get his chimney-money? How were
merchants to meet their obligations? The parsons on Sunday, the 9th of
September, ought to have had no difficulty in finding texts for their
sermons. Pepys went to church twice, but without edification, and
certainly Dean Harding, whom he heard complaining in the evening "that
the City had been reduced from a folio to a duo decimo," hardly rose to
the dignity of the occasion.

Strange to say, not a life was actually lost in the fire,[118:1] though
some old Londoners (among them Edmund Calamy's grandfather) died of
grief, and others (and among them Shirley the dramatist and his wife)
from exposure and exhaustion. One hysterical foreigner, who insisted
that he lit the flame, was executed, though no sensible man believed
what he said. It was long the boast of the merchants of London that no
one of their number "broke" in consequence of the great fire.

Unhappily the belief was widespread, as that "tall bully," the monument,
long testified, that the fire was the work of the Roman Catholics, and
aliens, suspected of belonging to our old religion, found it dangerous
to walk the streets whilst the embers still smoked, which they continued
to do for six months.

The meeting of Parliament was a little delayed in consequence of this
national disaster, and when it did m