which have been let for business purposes. It is a handsome skew bridge of iron, toned to a deep bronze green by enamel paint, and richly ornamented; its plinths above ground, its moulded bases, and its shafts, are respectively of grey, black, and exquisitely polished red granite. Its capitals are of grey granite, also polished, and set off by bronze foliage. Bronze lions, and four statues of Fine Art, Science, Commerce, and Agriculture, stand on the parapet-line on handsome plinths. These, and the projecting balconies and dormer window of the stone buildings just named, with their four statues of bygone civic worthies,—Fitz Aylwin, Sir William Walworth, Sir Thomas Gresham, and Sir Hugh Myddleton,—enhance the effect of the whole. Poor Chatterton, “the marvellous boy, the sleepless soul that perished in his pride,” after poisoning himself, in 1770, ere he was eighteen years of age, in Brooke Street, on the north side of Holborn, was laid in a pauper’s grave, in what was then the burying-ground of Shoe Lane Workhouse, and is now converted to very different purposes. Let us now come to Fleet Street. This thoroughfare—the main artery from St. Paul’s to the west—for many years has been emphatically one of literary associations, full as it is of newspaper and printing-offices. The late Angus B. Reach used humorously to call it, “The march of intellect.” Wynkyn de Worde, the early printer, lived here, and two of his books were “fynysshed and emprynted in Flete Streete, in ye syne of ye Sonne.” The _Devil_ tavern, which stood near Temple Bar, on the south side, was a favourite hostelrie of Ben Jonson. At the _Mitre_, near Mitre Court, Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, and Boswell, held frequent rendezvous. The _Cock_ was one of the oldest and least altered taverns in Fleet Street. The present poet-laureate, in one of his early poems, “A Monologue of Will Waterproof,” has immortalized it, in the lines beginning— “Thou plump head waiter at the _Cock_, To which I most resort, How goes the time? Is ’t nine o’clock? Then fetch a pint of port!” [Picture: Fleet Street from Mitre Court to Temple Bar. (The Temple, the River, Lambeth, and Houses of Parliament in the distance.)]