London's Earlier and Newer
Walls--The Site of St. Paul's--Fabulous Claims to Idolatrous
Renown--Existing Relics of Roman London--Treasures from the Bed of the
Thames--What we Tread underfoot in London--A vast Field of Story.

Eighteen feet below the level of Cheapside lies hidden Roman London, and
deeper even than that is buried the earlier London of those savage
charioteers who, long ages ago, bravely confronted the legions of Rome.
In nearly all parts of the City there have been discovered tesselated
pavements, Roman tombs, lamps, vases, sandals, keys, ornaments, weapons,
coins, and statues of the ancient Roman gods. So the present has grown
up upon the ashes of the past.

Trees that are to live long grow slowly. Slow and stately as an oak
London grew and grew, till now nearly four million souls represent its
leaves. Our London is very old. Centuries before Christ there probably
came the first few half-naked fishermen and hunters, who reared, with
flint axes and such rude tools, some miserable huts on the rising ground
that, forming the north bank of the Thames, slopes to the river some
sixty miles from where it joins the sea. According to some, the river
spread out like a vast lake between the Surrey and the Essex hills in
those times when the half-savage first settlers found the low slopes of
the future London places of health and defence amid a vast and dismal
region of fen, swamp, and forest. The heroism and the cruelties, the
hopes and fears of those poor barbarians, darkness never to be removed
has hidden from us for ever. In later days monkish historians, whom
Milton afterwards followed, ignored these poor early relations of ours
and invented, as a more fitting ancestor of Englishmen, Brute, a
fugitive nephew of AEneas of Troy. But, stroll on where we will, the
pertinacious savage, with his limbs stained blue and his flint axe red
with blood, is a ghost not easily to be exorcised from the banks of the
Thames, and in some Welsh veins his blood no doubt flows at this very
day. The founder of London had no historian to record his hopes--a place
where big salmon were to be found, and plenty of wild boars were to be
met with, was probably his highest ambition. How he bartered with
Phoenicians or Gauls for amber or iron no Druid has recorded. How he
slew the foraging Belgae, or was slain by them and dispossessed, no bard
has sung. Whether he was generous and heroic as the New Zealander, or
apelike and