tubes.  This was the first time all these important pipes had been so cleverly arranged in one easily accessible place.  They are ventilated and partially lighted through the pavement, and by gas.  Under each sub-way goes a sewer, with a path beside it for the sewer men when at work.  Outside the sub-way are ordinary house vaults of two or three storeys high, according to the height of the Viaduct.  These are divided by transverse walls; and, when houses are built against it, the Holborn Valley Viaduct will be shut out from sight, except in the case of the simple iron girder bridge over Shoe Lane, and the London, Chatham, and Dover bridge, with its sub-ways for gas and water pipes, and the fine bridge over Farringdon Street.  You will, we trust, now see how marvellously every yard of space has been utilized by the engineer, from the roadway down to the very foundations.  A few words must now be said about the splendid bridge over Farringdon Street.  This has public staircases running up inside handsome stone buildings—the upper parts of which have been let for business purposes.  It is a handsome skew bridge of iron, toned to a deep bronze green by enamel paint, and richly ornamented; its plinths above ground, its moulded bases, and its shafts, are respectively of grey, black, and exquisitely polished red granite.  Its capitals are of grey granite, also polished, and set off by bronze foliage.  Bronze lions, and four statues of Fine Art, Science, Commerce, and Agriculture, stand on the parapet-line on handsome plinths.  These, and the projecting balconies and dormer window of the stone buildings just named, with their four statues of bygone civic worthies,—Fitz Aylwin, Sir William Walworth, Sir Thomas Gresham, and Sir Hugh Myddleton,—enhance the effect of the whole.

Poor Chatterton, “the marvellous boy, the sleepless soul that perished in his pride,” after poisoning himself, in 1770, ere he was eighteen years of age, in Brooke Street, on the north side of Holborn, was laid in a pauper’s grave, in what was then the burying-ground of Shoe Lane Workhouse, and is now converted to very different purposes.

Let us now come to Fleet Street.  This thoroughfare—the main artery from St. Paul’s to the west—for many years has been emphatically one of literary associations, full as it is of newspaper and printing-offices.  The late Angus B. Reach used humorously to call it, “The march of intellect.”  Wynkyn de Worde, the early printer, lived here, and two of his books were “fynysshed and emprynted in Flete Streete, in ye syne of ye Sonne.”  The Devil tavern, which stood near Temple Bar, on the south side, was a favourite hostelrie of Ben Jonson.  At the Mitre, near Mitre Court, Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, and Boswell, held frequent rendezvous.  The Cock was one of the oldest and least altered taverns in Fleet Street.  The present poet-laureate, in one of his early poems, “A Monologue of Will Waterproof,” has immortalized it, in the lines beginning—

“Thou plump head waiter at the Cock,
   To which I most resort,
How goes the time?  Is ’t nine o’clock?
   Then fetch a pint of port!”

Dr. Johnson lived many years either in Fleet Street, in Gough Square, in the Temple, in Johnson’s Court, in Bolt Court, &c., &c.; and in Bolt Court he died.  William Cobbett, and Ferguson the astronomer, were also among the dwellers in that court.  John Murray (the elder) began the publishing business in Falcon Court.  Some of the early meetings of the Royal Society and of the Society of Arts took place in Crane Court.  Dryden and Richardson both lived in Salisbury Court.  Shire Lane (now Lower Serle’s Place), close to Temple Bar on the north, can count the names of Steele and Ashmole among its former inhabitants.  Izaak Walton lived a little way up Chancery Lane.  At the confectioner’s shop, nearly opposite that lane, Pope and Warburton first met.  Sir Symonds D’Ewes, ‘Praise-God Barebones,’ Michael Drayton, and Cowley the poet, all lived in this street.  Many of the courts, about a dozen in number, branching out of Fleet Street on the north and south, are so narrow that a stranger would miss them unless on the alert.  Child’s Banking House, the oldest in London, is at the western extremity of Fleet Street, on the south side, and also occupies the room over the arch of Temple Bar.  St. Bride’s Church exhibits one of Wren’s best steeples.  St. Dunstan’s Church, before it was modernized, had two wooden giants in front, that struck the hours with clubs on two bells—a duty which they still fulfil in the gardens belonging to the mansion of the Marquis of Hertford in the Regent’s Park.  North of Fleet Street are several of the Inns of Court, where lawyers congregate; and southward is the most famous of all such Inns, the large group of buildings constituting the Temple.  In the cluster of buildings lying east from the Temple once existed the sanctuary of Whitefriars, or Alsatia, as it was sometimes called, a description of which is given by Scott in the Fortunes of Nigel.  The streets here are still narrow and of an inferior order, but all appearance of Alsatians and their pranks is gone.  The boundary of the city, at the western termination of Fleet Street, is marked by Temple Bar, consisting of a wide central archway, and a smaller archway at each side for foot-passengers.  There are doors in the main avenue which can be shut at pleasure; but, practically, they are never closed, except on the occasion of some state ceremonial, when the lord mayor affects an act of grace in opening them to royalty.  The structure was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and erected in 1672.  The heads of decapitated criminals, after being boiled in pitch to preserve them, were exposed on iron spikes on the top of the Bar.  Horace Walpole, in his Letters to Montague, mentions the fact of a man in Fleet Street letting out “spy-glasses,” at a penny a peep, to passers-by, when the heads of some of the hapless Jacobites were so exposed.  The last heads exhibited there were those of two Jacobite gentlemen who took part in the rebellion of 1745, and were executed in that year.  Their heads remained a ghastly spectacle to the citizens till 1772, when they were blown down one night in a gale of wind.

Having thus noticed some of the interesting objects east of Temple Bar, we will now take

A FIRST GLANCE AT THE WEST END.

The Strand—so called because it lies along the bank of the river, now hidden by houses—is a long, somewhat irregularly built street, in continuation westward from Temple Bar; the thoroughfare being incommoded by two churches—St. Clement Dane’s and St. Mary’s—in the middle of the road.  On the site of the latter church once stood the old Strand Maypole.  The new Palace of Justice, about whose site there have been so many Parliamentary discussions, will stand on what is at present a huge unsightly space of boarded-in waste ground, formerly occupied by a few good houses, between Temple Bar and Clement’s Inn, and many wretched back-slums.  Not having the gift of prophecy as to its future, and warned by so many long delays in