the lofty battlement which crowns its broad _facade_. We could describe
and criticize the statue as well as if we stood under it, but other
travellers have done that. Where are all the people that ought to be
seen here? Hardly more than three or four figures are to be made out;
the rest were moving, and left no images in this slow, old-fashioned
picture,--how unlike the miraculous "instantaneous" Broadway of Mr.
Anthony we were looking at a little while ago! But there, on one side,
an omnibus has stopped long enough to be caught by the sunbeams. There
is a mark on it. Try it with a magnifier.
Charing
Strand
633.
Here are the towers of Westminster Abbey. A dead failure, as we well
remember them,--miserable modern excrescences, which shame the noble
edifice. We will hasten on, and perhaps by-and-by come back and enter
the cathedral.
How natural Temple Bar looks, with the loaded coach and the cab going
through the central arch, and the blur of the hurrying throng darkening
the small lateral ones! A fine old structure,--always reminds a
Bostonian of the old arch over which the mysterious _Boston Library_ was
said still to linger out its existence late into the present century.
But where are the spikes on which the rebels' heads used to grin until
their jaws fell off? They must have been ranged along that ledge which
forms the chord of the arch surmounting the triple-gated structure. To
the left a woman is spreading an awning before a shop;--a man would do
it for her here. Ghost of a boy with bundle,--seen with right eye only.
Other ghosts of passers or loiterers,--one of a pretty woman, as we
fancy at least, by the way she turns her face to us. To the right,
fragments of signs, as follow:
22
PAT
CO
BR
PR
What can this be but 229, _Patent Combs and Brushes_, PROUT? At any
rate, we were looking after Front's good old establishment, (229,
Strand,) which we remembered was close to Temple Bar, when we discovered
these fragments, the rest being cut off by the limits of the picture.
London Bridge! Less imposing than Waterloo Bridge, but a massive pile of
masonry, which looks as if its rounded piers would defy the Thames as
long as those of the Bridge of Sant' Angelo have stemmed the Tiber.
Figures indistinct or invisible, as usual, in the foreground, but
farther on a mingled procession of coaches, cabs, carts, and people.
See the groups in the recesses over the piers. The parapet is
breast-h
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