I remember, I was taken By my Aunt's peculiar cabby, For to hear the rafters shaken By the Choir in the Abbey. Nor the service, nor Te Deum Nor the sights of Christmas time, Could approach the Colosseum, Save, perhaps, the Pantomime. I remember, I remember, All those Ruins in the grounds, And the classic broken pillars (Sold for something like three pounds.) And the statues! One of Jason Was a noble work of art; They were knocked down to a mason, Who removed them in his cart. A little less than a year later a similar note is sounded when an announcement appeared advertising the sale of the "Supper Colonnade" at Vauxhall "to be sold cheap, a remnant of the past which has witnessed many a scene of merriment with lords and ladies of high degree." The disposal of relics, even dignified relics, has often been a problem to administrators. Parliament debated in 1860 what was to be done with the Duke of Wellington's funeral car, and it was ultimately stowed away in the crypt of St. Paul's. The old "Star and Garter" at Richmond was burned down in January, 1870, and _Punch_ was moved to a poetic valediction in the name of the old frequenters who associated it with the days of their courtship. The doom of Temple Bar was pronounced in the same year, but _Punch_ admits that those who lamented its doom were in "a small and mouldy minority." But there are no reserves in the protest uttered in 1871 against the pulling down of the City churches registered under the heading of "The Pick-axe Age":-- Go ahead, Gentlemen Governors. Pull down any secular building that seems to be in the way, and, as Sir Epicure Mammon says, "Now and then a Church." Temple Bar is doomed. Now Mr. Lowe wants to destroy the Church of St. Clement Danes, where Dr. Johnson used to worship. All right. St. Mary-le-Strand is an obstruction to vans and drays. Let us erase that. More room is wanted in Trafalgar Square, especially as Mr. Bruce hands it over to legislators of the rough kind; down with St. Martin. Then, though St. Margaret's has historical reminiscences, especially of Commonwealth days, and gives scale to the Abbey, there would be room for a large grass-plot for the people, with Ayrton-statues, were St. Margaret's invited to remove. The Abbey itself suggests an extinct superstition, and its architecture insults that of the Houses; do we want the Abbey? Then, what a splendid sweep for the carriages of the "self-made men of the City," civic knights, and the like, if St. Paul's Cathedral no longer blocked the road from Cheapside to Ludgate Hill! Go ahead, Gentlemen Governors. We can't do much in the way of building up fine things, but we are out-and-outers at knocking them down. [Sidenote: _Historic Landmarks_]