e know, has ever been met with in London excavations.

The Romans left deep footprints wherever they trod. Many of our London
streets still follow the lines they first laid down. The river bank
still heaves beneath the ruins of their palaces. London Stone, as we
have already shown, still stands to mark the starting-point of the great
roads that they designed. In a lane out of the Strand there still exists
a bath where their sinewy youth laved their limbs, dusty from the
chariot races at the Campus Martius at Finsbury. The pavements trodden
by the feet of Hadrian and Constantine still lie buried under the
restless wheels that roll over our City streets. The ramparts the
legionaries guarded have not yet quite crumbled to dust, though the rude
people they conquered have themselves long since grown into conquerors.
Roman London now exists only in fragments, invisible save to the prying
antiquary. As the seed is to be found hanging to the root of the ripe
wheat, so some filaments of the first germ of London, of the British hut
and the Roman villa, still exist hidden under the foundations of the
busy city that now teems with thousands of inhabitants. We tread under
foot daily the pride of our old oppressors.

CHAPTER II.

TEMPLE BAR.

Temple Bar--The Golgotha of English Traitors--When Temple Bar was
made of Wood--Historical Pageants at Temple Bar--The Associations of
Temple Bar--Mischievous Processions through Temple Bar--The First
grim Trophy--Rye-House Plot Conspirators.

Temple Bar was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, in 1670-72, soon after
the Great Fire had swept away eighty-nine London churches, four out of
the seven City gates, 460 streets, and 13,200 houses, and had destroyed
fifteen of the twenty-six wards, and laid waste 436 acres of buildings,
from the Tower eastward to the Inner Temple westward.

The old black gateway, once the dreaded Golgotha of English traitors,
separates, it should be remembered, the Strand from Fleet Street, the
city from the shire, and the Freedom of the City of London from the
Liberty of the City of Westminster. As Hatton (1708--Queen Anne)
says,--"This gate opens not immediately into the City itself, but into
the Liberty or Freedom thereof." We need hardly say that nothing can be
more erroneous than the ordinary London supposition that Temple Bar ever
formed part of the City fortifications. Mr. Gilbert a Beckett, laughing
at this tradition, once said in _Punch