As for churches, there has been such an enormous increase of churches in the last fifty years, that it seems churlish to lament the loss of half a dozen. But this half-dozen belongs to the City: they were churches built, for the most part, by Wren, on the site of ancient churches destroyed in the Fire; they were all hallowed by old and sacred associations; many of them were interesting and curious for their architecture: in a word, they ought not to have been pulled down in order to raise hideous warehouses over their site. Greed of gain prevailed; and they are gone. People found out that their number of worshippers was small, and argued that there was no longer any use for them. So they are gone, and can never be replaced. As for their names, they were the churches of Allhallows, Broad Street; St. Benet’s, Gracechurch Street; St. Dionis Backchurch; St. Michael’s, Queenhithe; St. Antholin’s, Budge Row; St. Bene’t Fink; St. Mary Somerset; St. Mary Magdalen; and St. Matthew, Friday Street. The church of St. Michael, Crooked Lane, in which was the grave of Sir William Walworth, disappeared in the year 1831; those of St. Bartholomew by Eastcheap, and of St. Christopher-le-Stock, which stood on either side of the Bank, were taken down in the years 1802 and 1781 respectively. The site of these old churches is generally marked by a small enclosure, grown over with thin grass, containing one, or at most two, tombs. It is about the size of a dining-room table, and you may read of it that the burying-ground of Saint So-and-so is still preserved. Indeed! Were the City churchyards of such dimensions? The ‘preservation’ of the burial-grounds is like the respect which used to be paid to the First Day of the week in the early lustra of the Victorian Age by the tobacconist. He kept one shutter up. So the desecrators of the City churchyards, God’s acre, the holy ground filled with the bones of dead citizens, measured off a square yard or two, kept one tomb, and built their warehouses over all the rest. [Illustration: LYONS INN IN 1804 (From an Engraving in Herbert’s ‘History of the Inns of Court’)]