ty bedesmen or
pensioners who rest there in the evening of their days. And quite
apart from its associations, I know no more beautiful place in the
City or anywhere else than the ancient Charter House.

Again, we may wander in the City and remember the great men who have
made certain streets for ever famous. Thus, to stand in Bread Street
is to think of Milton. Here he was born, here he was baptized, here
for a time he lived. Or we may visit Blackfriars and remember the
Elizabethan dramatists. Here Shakespeare had a house--it was among the
ruins of old Blackfriars Abbey, part of the foundations of which were
found when some years ago they made an extension of the Times'
printing office. Broad Street recalls the memory of Gresham, while
that of Whittington lingers along Thames Street and College Hill and
clings to St. Michael's Church. In that parish he lived and died. Here
he founded the College of the Holy Spirit which still exists in the
Highgate Almshouses; on its site the boys of Mercers School now study
and play. His tomb was burned in the Great Fire and his ashes
scattered, but the very streets preserve his name. Boas Alley, of
which there are two, records the fact that Whittington brought a
conduit or Boss of fresh water to this spot. It was he who paved
Guildhall, he who built a hall for the Grey Friars, now the Blue Coat
School, he who rebuilt Newgate; of all the merchants who have adorned
the great City not one whose memory is so widely spread and whose
example has so long survived his death. When country boys think of the
City of London they still think of Whittington.

Perhaps you are afraid that the preparation, the reading, for such a
walk about the City would be dull. I have never found it so. I do not
think that anyone who has the least love for, or knowledge of, old
things would find such reading dull. There are, to be sure, some
unhappy creatures who love nothing but what is new, and esteem
everything for what it will fetch. These are the people who are always
trying to pull down the City churches. They are at this very moment
pulling down another, the poor old church of St. Mary Magdalen. The
tower is down, the roof is off the windows are all broken, in a week
or two the church will be razed to the ground, and in a year or two
its very memory will have perished. Why, we vainly ask, do they pull
it down? What harm has the old church done? To be sure its
congregation numbered less than a dozen, but th