How is one to describe London, the capital of the British Empire, and the largest city in the world? The subject-matter would take volumes, if an exhaustive treatise be required. Here it necessarily can only be a slight sketch. If we are to put any reliance on Geoffrey of Monmouth, a city existed here 1107 years before Christ was born, and 354 even before Rome came into existence. The founder, he asserts, was Brute, a lineal descendant of the Trojan Æneas, by whom the city was called New Troy, or Troy-novant, till the advent of Lud, who changed it to Cœr Lud or Lud-town, and encompassed it with walls. Though the king's name is made evident in Ludgate Hill, which runs up to St. Paul's west front, this author's statements are considered as pleasing fictions by serious-minded authorities. Again, it is said to have been the capital of the Trinobantes in 54 B.C. With the arrival of the Romans we get more definite information, yet we are inclined to think that they must have found some kind of a British settlement, the more especially if we bear in mind that, until the Romans came, the mouth of the Thames was close at hand. The Thames of to-day was not the Thames of that time. It was very much shallower, possibly quite easy to ford at low tide. This was caused by the great inundation over large tracts of the counties of Kent and Essex, which took place every time it became high tide. Till the Romans set the example of reclaiming the land and confining the river to its channel, a great volume of water had thus expended itself and reduced the depth considerably. But to the early Britons, where the higher level of land checked and brought back the wandering Thames, to continue its upward course within its proper confinement, must have appeared the mouth. In their belief that such was the case it is only natural to suppose that the Britons would take advantage of such an excellent site. A clearing was gradually made, for London was well wooded once, on the highest ground, which would be somewhere from the site of St. Paul's to as far as the Bank of England, and a temple was erected within some groves. To the Romans in 61 A.D. it was known as Londinium or Colonia Augusta, the former, no doubt, being a Latinised form of Lyn-Din, meaning "the town on the lake." Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, in the same year is credited with having reduced it to ashes, and to have put 70,000 Romans and strangers to the sword. This wholesale slaughter was punished, in the same year, by Suetonius, who retaliated by a massacre of 80,000 Britons, a defeat that so preyed upon Boadicea that she promptly poisoned herself. Tacitus, the Roman historian, who lived about 90 years after Christ, relates how Suetonius felt constrained to abandon London, "that place of busy traffic and thronged with traders," to the British, because he did not feel equal to the task of defending it. This is surely a proof that London was no mushroom