Marvellous changes have been effected in the way of {250} buildings and improvements during the last thirty years, but much of the poverty and sickness that belonged to these neighbourhoods remain. The looms may be silent in the upper workshops with their wide leaden casements, but the labour by which the people live seldom brings higher wages than suffice for mere subsistence. The great building in which treasures of art and science are collected is suggestive of some kind of recognition of the need of the inhabitants for rational recreation and instruction, and what is perhaps more to the purpose, it is also a recognition of their desire for both; but it cannot be denied that the recognition has come late, and has not been completely accompanied by those provisions for personal comfort, health, and decency, which a stringent application of existing laws might long ago have ensured in neighbourhoods that for years were suffered to remain centres of pestilence. The greatest change ever effected in this quarter of London was that which followed the formation of Victoria Park. That magnificent area, with its lakes and islands, its glorious flower-beds and plantations, its cricket-ground and great expanse of open field, made Bethnal Green famous. There had always been a fine stretch of open country beyond what was known as "the Green," on which the building of the Museum now stands. A roadway between banks and hedges skirting wide fields led to the open space where a queer old mansion could be seen amidst a few tall trees, while beyond this again, across the canal bridge, were certain country hostelries, one of them with what was, in that day, a famous "tea-garden;" and, farther on, a few farms and some large old-fashioned private residences stood amidst meadows, gardens, and cattle pastures, on {251} either side of the winding road leading away to the Hackney Marshes and the low-lying fields beyond the old village of Homerton. It was on a large portion of this rural area that Victoria Park was founded. Tavern and farmhouse disappeared; the canal bridge was made ornamental; and just beyond the queer old mansion that stood by the roadway, the great stone and iron gates of "the people's pleasure-ground" were erected. Now, the mansion, to which I have already twice referred, was in fact one of the few romantic buildings of the district, for it was what remained of the house of the persecuting Bishop Bonner, and the four most prominent of the tall trees—those having an oblong or pit excavation of the soil at the foot of each—were traditionally the landmarks of the martyrdom of four sisters who were there burnt at the stake and buried in graves indicated by the hollows in the ground, which popular superstition had declared could never be filled up.