ried about in Lord Mayor's Shows, was discussed by many
generations of angry antiquaries. In Strype's time, when there were
pictures of Queen Anne, King William and his consort Mary, at the east
end of the hall, the two pantomime giants of renown stood by the steps
going up to the Mayor's Court. The one holding a poleaxe with a spiked
ball, Strype considered, represented a Briton; the other, with a
halbert, he opined to be a Saxon. Both of them wore garlands. What was
denied to great and learned was disclosed to the poor and simple. Hone,
the bookseller, or one of his writers, came into possession of a little
guide-book sold to visitors to the Guildhall in 1741; this set Mr.
Fairholt, a most diligent antiquary, on the right track, and he soon
settled the matter for ever. Gog and Magog were really Corineus and
Gogmagog. The former, a companion of Brutus the Trojan, killed, as the
story goes, Gogmagog, the aboriginal giant.

Our sketch of City pageants has already shown that two hundred years ago
giants named Corineus and Gogmagog (which ought to have put our
antiquaries earlier on the right scent) formed part of the procession.
In 1672 Thomas Jordan, the City poet, in his own account of the
ceremonial, especially mentions two giants fifteen feet high, in two
several chariots, "talking and taking tobacco as they ride along," to
the great admiration and delight of the spectators. "At the conclusion
of the show," says the writer, "they are to be set up in Guildhall,
where they may be daily seen all the year, and, I hope, never to be
demolished by such dismal violence (the Great Fire) as happened to their
predecessors." These giants of Jordan's, being built of wickerwork and
pasteboard, at last fell to decay. In 1706 two new and more solid giants
of wood were carved for the City by Richard Saunders, a captain in the
trained band, and a carver, in King Street, Cheapside. In 1837, Alderman
Lucas being mayor, copies of these giants walked in the show, turning
their great painted heads and goggling eyes, to the delight of the
spectators. The Guildhall giants, as Mr. Fairholt has shown, with his
usual honest industry, are mentioned by many of our early poets,
dramatists, and writers, as Shirley, facetious Bishop Corbet, George
Wither, and Ned Ward. In Hone's time City children visiting Guildhall
used to be told that every day when the giants heard the clock strike
twelve they came down to dinner. Mr. Fairholt, in his "Gog and Mago