less than a
house--with a private garden. I had thought that the last was
destroyed about four years ago when they pulled down a certain noble
old merchant's mansion, No, there is one other stall left; perhaps
more. There are gardens, I know, belonging to certain Companies'
Halls; there is the ivy-planted garden of Amen Court; there are
burying-grounds laid out as gardens; but this is the only house I know
in the City which has a private garden at the back. One must not say
where it is, otherwise that garden will be seized and built upon. This
the owner evidently fears, for he has surrounded it by a high wall, so
that no one shall be able to seize it, no rich man shall covet it, and
offer to buy it and build great warehouses upon it, and the
underground railway shall not dig it out and swallow it up.

In such journeyings and wanderings one must not go with an empty mind,
otherwise there will be neither pleasure nor profit. The traveller,
says Emerson, brings away from his travels precisely what he took
there. Not his mind but his climate, says Horace, does he change who
travels beyond the seas. In other words, if a man who knows nothing of
archaeology goes to see a collection of flint implements, or a person
ignorant of art goes to see a picture gallery, he comes away as
ignorant as he went, because flint implements by themselves, or
pictures by themselves, teach nothing. They can teach nothing. So, if
a man who knows nothing of history should stand before Guildhall on
the quietest Sunday in the whole year he will see nothing but a
building, he will hear nothing but the fluttering wings of the
pigeons. And if he wanders in the streets he will see nothing but tall
and ugly houses, all with their blinds pulled down. Before he goes on
a pilgrimage in the City he must first prepare his mind by reading
history. This is not difficult to find. If he is in earnest he will
get the great 'Survey of London,' by Strype and Stow, published in the
year 1720 in two folio volumes. If this is too much for him, there are
Peter Cunningham, Timbs, Thornbury, Walford, Hare, Loftie, and a dozen
others, all of whom have a good deal to tell him, though there is
little to tell, save a tale of destruction, after Strype and Stow.

Thus, before he begins he should learn something of Roman London,
Saxon London, Norman London, of London medieval, London under the
Tudors, London of the Stuarts, and London of the Georges. He should
learn how the mun