Wearied of its old grandeur, pondering, as old men ponder, over its dead kings--for Wat Tyler and his Kentish men need no Riot Act to quiet them now--the Savoy and its crowned ghosts drift on with our methodical planet, meekly awaiting the death-blow that time must some day inflict. Tait Wilkinson’s father was a minister of the Savoy. Garrick helped to transport him by informing against him for illegally performing the marriage ceremony. In return, Garrick helped forward the son--“an exotic,” as he called him, rather than an actor--but a wonderful mimic, not only of voice and manner, but even of features. He used to reproduce Foote’s imitations of the older actors--as Mathews afterward imitated Wilkinson, who in his time had imitated Foote, to that impudent buffoon’s great vexation. The _Examiner_, whose office is near Waterloo Bridge, was started by Leigh Hunt and his brother John in 1808. It began by boldly asserting the necessity for reform, lampooning the Regent, and attacking the cant and excesses of Methodism. In 1812 both the Hunts were found guilty of having called the Prince Regent “the Prince of Whales” and “a fat Adonis of fifty,” and were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in Horsemonger Lane gaol, and to pay a fine of £500. At a later period, Hazlitt joined the paper, and wrote for it the essays reprinted (in 1817) under the title of _The Round Table_.[219] Close to it is the office of the _Spectator_, another paper of the same calibre and class, and more important than the _Examiner_ now, though its early history is not so interesting. Waterloo Bridge, one of those marvels built by the industrious simple-hearted John Rennie, was opened by the Prince Regent in 1817. Dupin declared it was a colossal monument worthy of Sesostris or the Cæsars; and what most struck Canova in England was that the foolish Chinese Bridge then in St. James’s Park should be the production of the Government, while Waterloo Bridge was the result of mere private enterprise.[220] The bridge did not settle more than a few inches after the centres were struck. The project of erecting the Strand Bridge, as it was first called, was started by a company in 1809, a joint-stock-fever year. Rennie received £1000 a year for himself and assistants, or £7: 7s. a day, and expenses. The bridge consists of nine arches, of 120 feet span, with piers 20 feet thick, the arches being plain semi-ellipses, with their crowns 30 feet above high water. Over the points of each pier are placed Doric column pilasters, after a design taken from the Temple of Segesta in Sicily. In the construction of the bridge the chief features of Rennie’s management were the following:--The employment of coffer-dams in founding the piers; new methods of constructing, floating, and fixing the centres; the introduction and working of Aberdeen granite to an extent before unknown; and the adoption of elliptical stone arches of an unusual width.