undulation, soon lost in the general distracting cohesion of all and everything." It may be interesting here to recall Lord Tennyson's sonnet, and the story told of it by his son: "When Cleopatra's Needle was brought to London, Stanley asked my father to make some lines upon it; to be engraven on the base. These were put together by my father at once, and I made a note of them: _Cleopatra's Needle._ "Here, I that stood in On beside the flow Of sacred Nile, three thousand years ago!-- A Pharaoh, kingliest of his kingly race, First shaped, and carved, and set me in my place. A Cæsar of a punier dynasty Thence haled me toward the Mediterranean sea, Whence your own citizens, for their own renown, Thro' strange seas drew me to your monster town. I have seen the four great empires disappear! I was when London was not! I am here!" [Illustration: _The "Top" Season._] Waterloo Bridge, crossing the Thames at Somerset House, was built by Rennie in 1817. Canova considered it "the noblest bridge in the world, and worth a visit from the remotest corners of the earth." It was at first intended to call it the "Strand" Bridge; but it was eventually named "Waterloo," in honour of the victory just won. Yet Waterloo Bridge is not without its dismal associations. So many people, for instance, have committed suicide from it, that it has been called the "English Bridge of Sighs." It suggests Hood's ballad of the "Unfortunate": "The bleak wind of March Made her tremble and shiver: But not the dark arch Or the black flowing river." Waterloo Bridge has indeed been the last resource of many an unhappy human moth--attracted by "the cruel lights of London"--to whom "When life hangs heavy, death remains the door To endless rest beside the Stygian shore." Dante Rossetti, who painted his terrible picture of the lost girl found by her old lover on a London bridge at dawning, has well realised the ineffable sadness of the wrecks made by this whirlpool of London. The Victoria Embankment, and indirectly also this splendid Waterloo Bridge, have given cause for one of the most eloquent diatribes of our greatest æsthetic critic. Mr. Ruskin, though he cannot but admire the vast curve of Waterloo Bridge, where the Embankment road passes under it, "as vast, it alone, as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in proportions," yet finds, in the wretched attempts at decoration on the Embankment, and in the sad want of "human imagination" of the English architect, windmills apt and ready to his lance. Unlike the Rialto, the "Waterloo arch," he remarks plaintively, "is nothing more than a gloomy and hollow heap of wedged blocks of blind granite":