self. The last
suicide was in August, 1842, when a servant-girl from Hoxton, named Jane
Cooper, while the watchman had his head turned, nimbly climbed over the
iron railing, tucked her clothes tight between her knees, and dived
head-fore-most downwards. In her fall she struck the griffin on the
right side of the base of the Monument, and, rebounding into the road,
cleared a cart in the fall. The cause of this act was not discovered.
Suicides being now fashionable here, the City of London (not a moment
too soon) caged in the top of the Monument in the present ugly way.

The Rev. Samuel Rolle, writing of the Great Fire in 1667, says--"If
London its self be not the doleful monument of its own destruction, by
always lying in ashes (which God forbid it should), it is provided for
by Act of Parliament, that after its restauration, a pillar, either of
brass or stone, should be erected, in perpetual memory of its late most
dismall conflagration."

"Where the fire began, there, or as near as may be to that place, must
the pillar be erected (if ever there be any such). If we commemorate the
places where our miseries began, surely the causes whence they sprang
(the meritorious causes, or sins, are those I now intend) should be
thought of much more. If such a Lane burnt London, sin first burnt that
Lane; _causa, causa est causa causatio; affliction springs not out of
the dust_; not but that it may spring thence immediately (as if the dust
of the earth should be turned into lice), but primarily and originally
it springs up elsewhere.

"As for the inscription that ought to be upon that pillar (whether of
brass or stone), I must leave it to their piety and prudence, to whom
the wisdom of the Parliament hath left it; only three things I both wish
and hope concerning it. The first is, that it may be very humble, giving
God the glory of his righteous judgments, and taking to ourselves the
shame of our great demerits. Secondly, that the confession which shall
be there engraven may be as impartial as the judgement itself was; not
charging the guilt for which that fire came upon a few only, but
acknowledging that all have sinned, as all have been punished. Far be it
from any man to say that his sins did not help to burn London, that
cannot say also (and who that is I know not) that neither he nor any of
his either is, or are ever like to be, anything the worse for that
dreadful fire. Lastly, whereas some of the same religion with those th