To see and know the City with any proper appreciation of its interests and beauties, would require many days of wandering and leisured perambulation. In no part of London do things and views come upon the pedestrian with more startling suddenness. Emerging from some narrow and smoky alley, where the house-roofs, perhaps, nearly meet overhead, he may find himself, by some sharp turn of the ways, almost directly under the enormous blackened dome of St. Paul's,--looking, in such close proximity,--and especially if there happen to be any fog about,--of positively incredible size. Or he may find peaceful red-brick rectories, that suggest country villages, adjoining, in all charity, noisy mills and warehouses; or railways and canals, which give forth smoke and steam with amiable impartiality, and intersect streets where fragments of old houses yet linger in picturesque decay; or, again, noisy tram-lines, cutting through mediæval squares, that, once upon a time, were peaceful and residential. Yet, after all, it ill becomes us to murmur at the tram-lines and the railways; we ought rather to be thankful that anything at all of the old time is left us. For, in the City, where things are, and ever must be, chiefly utilitarian, the survival of ancient relics is all the more to be wondered at. But the time of careless and rash destruction is past. The antiquarian spirit is now fairly in our midst, and mediæval remains are preserved, sometimes even at no slight inconvenience. And when the progress of the world, and of railways, requires certain sites, even then the buildings on these, or their most interesting portions, are, so far as possible, spared and protected from further injury. Thus, when the site of "Sir Paul Pindar's" beautiful old mansion in Bishopsgate Street was required for the enlargements of the Great Eastern Railway Company, its elaborately-carved wooden front was transported bodily to the South Kensington Museum, which it now adorns; and the church tower of the ancient "All Hallows Staining," surviving its demolished nave and choir, still stands, a curiously isolated relic, in the green square of the Clothworkers' Hall; that company being bound over to keep it in order and repair. Similarly, the pains and the great expense incurred in the careful restoration of that old Holborn landmark, Staple Inn, a score or so of years back, are well known. And "Crosby Hall," anciently Crosby Place, that famous Elizabethan mansion commemorated in Shakespeare's _Richard III._, is now, after much danger and many vicissitudes, utilised for the purposes of a restaurant, which, at least ensures the keeping of it in proper and timely repair. Fifty, even thirty, years ago, ancient monuments were more lightly valued, sometimes even rescued with difficulty from the hands of the destroyer; now, however, the veneration for old landmarks is more widespread. Repairs to old buildings are, to a certain extent,