It is at Aldgate that on the east the city proper ends ; but although the pump still stands, the gate is no more Chaucer was once the tenant of the dwelling-house over the gate and, being a wine merchant, of the cellars beneath it. Mention of the poet reminds me that we have not yet been to the Borough to see the Tabard; and this is a good opportunity by bus it will need two buses to London Bridge. Not the London Bridge of the old prints, with its houses and shops massed higher and thicker than any on Firenze's Ponte Vecchio, but the very utilitarian structure that ousted it.

London Bridge is the highest point to which great vessels can come: beyond are only tugs and such minor craft as can lower their funnels or masts and so creep beneath the arches. It has always typified London's business to me, because when I used as a child to come to town on my way to school, we came to London Bridge station, and the first great excitement was to cross the river here: the second, to lunch at Crosby Hall amid Tudor trappings. I still always loiter on London Bridge looking over at the bustling stevedores and listening to the donkey engines and the cranes. From this point the Tower Bridge is the gate of London indeed, and the Tower indescribably solemn and medieval. St. Dunstan's-in-the-East hangs in the sky, a fairy spire, the only white and radiant thing amid the dull and grey.

St. Saviour's, which is now grandly known as Southwark Cathedral, is architecture of a different type, but it is beautiful too and sits as comfortably as any brooding hen. It' is interesting both in its old parts and its new very new indeed, but harmonious, and carefully reproducing what has been lost. In the vestry you may still see a Norman arch or two from the twelfth century. After a fire in the thirteenth century it was built again ; and again and again since has it been enlarged and repaired. But it should now rest a while, secure from masons. Be sure to ask the verger for the story of St. Mary Overty, who founded the priory of which this is the church: he tells it better than I could, and believes it too. He will also give you some interesting views on American glass as you stand before the window presented by Harvard University, and will recite epitaphs to you, with much taste and feeling, including the lines on the World's Nonsuch, a beautiful and holy virgin of fourteen. Among these epitaphs is one upon Lockyer, the Cockle and Holloway, Beecham and Carter of his time the middle of the seventeenth century:

His Virtues and his Pills are so well known,

That Envy can't confine them under Stone.

But they'll survive his dust and not expire,

Till all things else at th' Universal Fire.

Yet where are the pills of Lockyer? Where are the galleons of Spain? Of another worthy parishioner, Garrard, a grocer, it was written :

Weep not for him, since he is gone before,

To Heaven, where Grocers there are many more.

The church has old tombs and new windows, those in the new nave being very happily chosen and designed: one to Shakespeare, for his connection with Bankside and its Theatres ; one to Massinger, who is buried here; one to John Fletcher, who is buried here too ; one to Alleyn the actor; one to Gower, the Father of English Poetry, who is buried here and founded a chantry; one to Chaucer, who sent forth his pilgrims from the Tabard hard by; and one to Bunyan, erected with pennies subscribed by Southwark children. Although the church is so lenient to literature and the stage, no hero from the neighbouring bear pit and bull-baiting arena is celebrated here.

ST. DUNSTAN'S-IN-THE-EAST

The Tabard to-day is just a new inn on the site of the old and is not interesting; but there is an inn close to it, a few yards north, on the cast side of the High Street, which preserves more of old coaching London than any that is now left, and is, I think, the only one remaining that keeps its galleries. I mean the George. When I came to London the White Hart, a little to the north of this, still retained its yard and galleries just as in the days when Samuel Weller was the boots here and first met Mr. Pickwick on his way to catch Jingle and Miss Wardle. So did the Bull and the Bell in Holborn. But these have all been renewed or removed, and the George is now alone. It stands in its yard, painted a cheerful colour, and the coffee room has a hot fire and high-backed bays to sit in, and the bar is a paradise of bottles. Surely the spirit of Dickens, who so loved the Borough, broods here. Surely the ghosts of Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen drop in now and then from Lant Street, and it is not too far for Mr. Micawber's genial spook to send for a bottle of something encouraging, from the King's Bench prison.

One generally has the feeling that one is in a London of a many years earlier date than that across London Bridge. Perhaps it is beer that keeps progress in check, for the hop merchants congregate here.

The church of St. George the Martyr brick and stone (you see the spire in Hogarth's "Southwark Fair") brings other memories of Dickens, for it was in the vestry here that little Dorrit slept, while the prisoners who died in the Marshalsea and King's Bench prison lie in its burial ground, now partly built over. The King's Bench prison, which existed so largely for debtors, had many illustrious visitors besides Mr. Micawber, sent thither not only by the eternal want of pence but also for some of the more positive offences. Among them was John Wilkes (for libel), Haydon, who painted his "Mock Election" here, William Combe, who wrote Syntax's Tours here, and William Hone, who edited his "Table Book" while in captivity. Hone was not in the prison but in its "rules" which included several streets round about, but no public-house and no theatre. Alleviations were however found. The Dorrit family were in the Marshalsea, which adjoined the King's Bench and had, like all the debtors' prisons, a skittle alley in which the gentlemen might, in Dickens's phrase, "bowl down their troubles." If you walk into Leyton's Buildings, which is very old and picturesque and has a noble timber yard at the -end of it, you will be within this prison area. The Marshalsea not only harboured gentlemen who could not meet their bills, but had a compound for smugglers also. Nearly three hundred years ago some of the sweetest notes that ever struck a bliss upon the air of a prison cell rose from the Marshalsea, for here George Neither wrote his "Shepherd's Hunting."

One should certainly walk up St. Thomas's Street, if only to see the doorway of the house to the east of the Chapter House, and also to peep into Guy's, so venerable and staid and useful, and so populous with students and nurses, all wearing that air of resolute and assertive good health more, of immortality that always seems to belong to the officers of a hospital. And yet and yet John Keats was once a student at this very institution !