But meanwhile we are due in Cheapside again.

THE CHARTERHOUSE

The British Museum has the first name for pigeons in London the pigeon being our sacred bird, our ibis and truly there are none bigger: they have breasts like cannon balls ; but the Guildhall's birds are even tamer. In crossing the courtyard in front of the Guildhall one really has to step carefully to avoid treading on them, so casual are they and so confident that you will behave.

The Guildhall has in its basement a collection of articles I which are sufficiently relating to the history of the city, interesting to be well worth a visit. Relics of Roman occupation ; old inn signs, including the Boar's Head in Eastcheap which Falstaff frequented; instruments of punishment from Newgate; old utensils and garments ; prints and broadsheets ; and so forth. But the chief collection of such articles is now to be seen at the London Museum proper, which we have not yet reached.

While we are here we ought to visit the Guildhall Picture Gallery and see what kind of art the City Fathers patronise. Having written of it at some length in "London Revisited," all that I say here is that it is an interesting and varied collection, with a masterpiece by William Dyce in it. The Royal Exchange, not very distant, has also some attractive mural painting.

The Lord Mayor's departure for or from the Guildhall is a piece of civic pomp that never fails to please the tolerant observer. He drives in a golden chariot, with four horses to draw it and two footmen to stand behind; while an officer in a cocked hat, carrying a sword, rides on in front, and mounted policemen serve as an escort. The Lord Mayor climbs in first, a figure of medieval splendour, in robes and furs and golden chain, more like a Rabbi in a Rembrandt picture than a London magistrate about to send a costermonger to prison; then another elderly and august masquerader is pushed in; and then the mace bearer is added, holding that bauble so that its head is well out of the window. The golden carriage, which is on cee springs and was built to carry Cinderella, and none other, swings like a cradle as these, medievalists sink into their seats. The powdered footmen leap to their station at the back; the coachman cracks his whip; and the pageant is complete. Then the crowd of cynical Londoners porters, clerks, errand boys, business men, who have found, as Londoners always will find, time to observe the spectacle (and it is all one to them whether it is a Lord Mayor, or an Italian laying asphalt melts, and the twentieth century once more resumes its sway.

I am quite aware that I am treating the city too lightly ; but it cannot be helped. One chapter is useless: it wants many books. No sooner does one begin to burrow beneath the surface of it into the past than one realises how fascinating but also how gigantic is the task before one. Reasons of space, apart from other causes, have held my pen. The literary associations of the city alone are endless. It is in Threadneedle Street that Lamb's old South Sea House stood; in Leadenhall Street we have just seen the modern representative of his East India House. It was in a house in Birchin Lane that the infant Macaulay opening the door to his father's friend Hannah More, asked her to step in and wait while he fetched her a glass of "old spirits," such as they drank in "Robinson Crusoe." It was at the corner of Wood Street that Wordsworth's poor Susan imagined herself in the country ; and here still stands a famous city tree, but its limbs are sadly lopped.