Yet these mere names that he has seen on a dingy wall, like advertisements, are really the foundation stones of London; and it is right that they should (as it were) be underground. The mere fact that these five names, in a row along the riverside, all bear witness to an ancient religion would tell the rustic in the railway train (supposing him to be of elaborate culture and lightning deduction) the great part of the history of London. The old Temple Church still stands, full of the tombs of those great and doubtful heroes who signed themselves with the sign of Christ, but who came, rightly or wrongly, to be stamped by their neighbours with the seal of Antichrist. The old Charing Cross is gone; but its very absence is as much of a historical monument as itself. For the Puritans pulled it down merely for being a cross; though (as it says in a humorous song of the period) Charing Cross had always refrained from uttering a word against the authority of the Parliament. But these old things, though fundamental, are fragmentary; and whether as ruins or merely as records, will tell the stranger little of what London has been and is, as distinct from Paris or Berlin or Chicago. London is a mediaeval town, as these names testify; but its soul has been sunk deeper under other things than any other town that remembers mediaevalism at all. It is very hard indeed to find London in London. There is a story (one among many) that there was a settlement before the Romans came, which occupied about the same space that is now occupied by Cannon Street Station. In any case, it is probable that the seed of the city was sown somewhere about that slope of the riverside. The Romans made it a great town but hardly their greatest town, and the barbarism of the ninth century left it bare. Its second or third foundation as a predominant city belongs, like many such things, to the genius and tenacity of Alfred. He did not indeed hold it as a capital of England, but rather as an outpost of Wessex. From his point of view, London was a suburb of Wantage. But he saw the practical importance of its position towards the river mouth; and he held it tight. The Norman Conquest clinched the condition, which was roughly symbolized by the Tower of London, which for many centuries was a trophy captured and recaptured by opposite factions. But, in the main, London had one political character from first to last. It was always, for good or evil, on the side of the Parliament and against the King. Six hundred years ago, it was the citizens of London who had to stand the charge of the strongest of the Plantagenets in his youth, on the downs round Lewes. Four hundred years afterwards, it was the citizens of London who held the high places of Buckinghamshire, when the army of Charles I threatened London from Oxford. Later still, the Londoners stood solidly against James II and splendidly against George III. Whether Parliament was worth such