tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}img"/>

In exterior they are generally plain and the door which leads to them is not labeled or in many cases to be distinguished from the doors of offices or warehouses near it. "In a few cases," writes Mr. Moore, "a small and insignificant brass plate near a bell-handle bears the word 'Beadle,' or sometimes even lifts the veil of mystery a little higher and records a name, as 'Weavers' Hall.' To ring the bell requires nearly as much courage as that of Jack the Giant-killer when he blew the horn that hung at the giant's gate. The beadle, or more often the sub-beadle,—for the beadle himself is too great to be lightly disturbed,—appears. You feel instantly that you are intruding, that you had no right to ring, and that you are in much the position of a man who has impertinently rung at the door of a private house and asked to see the drawing-room. If you have an introduction, above all, if you know any one on the court of the company, as its governing body is called, the beadle unbends a little, and you are admitted. You enter a great paneled hall decorated with armorial bearings, with portraits, and with banners. You are in the very heart of the city of London, where land is worth £100,000 or more an acre, yet there is a delicious garden, a court-yard recalling Italy, a splashing fountain, or a noble old tree. This element of surprise, of contrast between the rushing crowd in the street outside and the perfect fourteenth century stillness within the halls of these ancient guilds, adds much to the pleasure of seeing curious things at which you are not asked to look. You feel in a few minutes how great a thing it is to be a merchant tailor or a cloth-worker or a grocer, superlative and unattainable; and you walk round the hall with the beadle in a deferential, humble frame of mind only comparable to the sensation of a pilgrim who is just about to kiss or has just finished kissing the toe of his holiness the Pope.

CARVED CHOIR STALL

BAPTISTERY, PISA      MODERN (1856)

"The halls of nearly all the companies were consumed in the great fire, so that most of their buildings date from the last years of the house of Stuart, and in later times some have been rebuilt in a style of profuse magnificence. Nevertheless, there is hardly one which does not contain some picturesque bit of architecture or wood-carving, curious portrait, quaintly carved figure, beautifully illumined charter, or splendid piece of plate. The wood-carving in many is superb,—in none finer than in the Brewers' Hall,—and the combination of the dark color of old oak with the bright tinctures of painted armorial bearings occurs in endless and always picturesque variety. The quite self-content and the half-private character of the guilds have prevented a thorough investigation of their history. They themselves feel, as any one who with the feeling of ownership dines often in such halls as theirs must come to feel, that no one but one of themselves could do them justice; that a haberdasher alone could write of haberdashers, a grocer of grocers, a vintner of vintners. One or two good histories of particular companies have been written by members, but all the general accounts are deficient in thoroughness. It must be remembered, too, that these ancient corporations suffered a terrible shock at the hands of the law-officers of Charles II., who forced open their muniment chests, asked why and wherefore about everything, and