Westminster Hall had rows of little shops or booths ranged all along each wall inside; they had been there for generations, and they certainly did not add either to the beauty or the safety of the ancient hall. In the early part of the seventeenth century some of them took fire and came near to laying in ashes one of the oldest occupied buildings in the world. Luckily, however, the fire was put out with slight damage, but the dangerous little shops were suffered to remain then and for long after. [Sidenote: 1714--Old London] The Lesser London of that day lives for us in contemporary engravings, in the pages of the _Spectator_ and the {65} _Tatler_, in the poems of Swift and Pope, in the pictures of Hogarth. Hogarth's men and women belong indeed to a later generation than the generation which Bolingbroke dazzled, and Marlborough deceived, and Arbuthnot satirized, and Steele made merry over. But it is only the men and women who are different; the background remains the same. New actors have taken the parts; the costumes are somewhat altered, but the scenes are scarcely changed. There may be a steeple more or a sign-board less in the streets that Hogarth drew than there were when Addison walked them, but practically they are the same, and remained the same for a still later generation. Maps of the time show us how curiously small London was. There is open country to the north, just beyond Bloomsbury Square; Sadler's Wells is out in the country, so is St. Pancras, so is Tottenham Court, so is Marylebone. At the east Stepney lies far away, a distant hamlet. Beyond Hanover Square to the west stretch fields again, where Tyburn Road became the road to Oxford. There is very little of London south of the river.