Mediæval London was a town in which the clerical element predominated. I have upon the screen a very beautiful drawing which appeared in the _Builder_ newspaper, and which is an imaginative and authoritative reconstruction of the London of Henry VIII., by Mr. W. H. Brewer, whose great talents will be obvious to all who look at his picture. London at that time must have been exceedingly beautiful, filled as it was by grand ecclesiastical and monastic institutions. The artist’s point of view is from some coign of vantage east of the Tower. In front of him, in the middle distance, forming at once the centre and apex of the picture, is old St. Paul’s, with its lofty steeple towering to a height of 500 feet, and placed on an eminence which enhances its commanding importance. To the left is the noble river, its broad expanse dotted with many a craft, and forming a superb sweep to the south-west, where it is lost beyond the Abbey of Westminster, which forms the most distant object to the left of the spectator. The chief feature in the foreground is “The Tower,” a noble mixture of military, palatial, ecclesiastical, and domestic architecture. Beyond it, and to the south, is old London Bridge, probably the most picturesque structure of the kind that the world has ever seen, with its quaint houses and graceful chapel, and with the clear water of the Thames roaring through its nineteen narrow arches. On the south side of the bridge is the church of the Priory of St. Mary Overy (St. Saviour’s, Southwark), as it may still be seen, and near it the great palace of the Bishops of Winchester, with the marshy ground of Southwark and Lambeth, and Lambeth Palace in the distance. Running northward from the Tower is the castellated city wall, with its brimming ditch filled with water flowing from the shallow lake of Moorfields. Between the wall and the spectator is a series of grand ecclesiastical buildings, with St. Katherine’s Hospital to the south, and St. Mary Spital to the north, and between them Eastminster or the Abbey of Grace, the Abbey of St. Clare in the Minories, and the church of St. Botolph. Behind the city wall is seen a bewildering wealth of tower and spire and gabled roof.