Dickens always delighted in the mystery attendant on banks and their cashiers, old mouldy mercantile houses where yet a large and safe business was done; and these things he could interpret and give significance to, just as Wordsworth and the later poets did with their favourite district. When Temple Bar was removed in 1878, there was removed with it a building which touched it, and was as old and grimy, Child’s venerable bank. It is difficult to call up either structure now, though the frequent “omnibus outside” may have occasionally turned his eyes to the blackened walls and to the windows in the Bar, a sort of store room where were kept stacked away all the old account books of the firm. The late Peter Cunningham was allowed, I believe, to rummage here, and discovered some curious documents, among which were cheques drawn by Nell Gwynne, who kept her account with the Childs or the predecessors of the firm. Speaking of the old house Dickens says, in the “Tale of Two Cities”: “Tellson’s Bank, by Temple Bar, was an old-fashioned place even in the year 1780. It was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious. Any one of the partners would have disinherited his son on the question of rebuilding Tellson’s. Thus it had come to pass that Tellson’s was the triumphant perfection of inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson’s down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters; where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet Street, and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper and the shadow of Temple Bar.” Dickens just lived to see the extraordinary wholesale reformation that took place in the construction of the Holborn Viaduct, with the levelling and sweeping away of some of his most popular localities. The Holborn Valley before lay between two steep hills, of which Snow Hill was one, and on Snow Hill was “The Saracen’s Head,” where Mr. Squeers invariably put up. This old hostelry stood close to St. Sepulchre’s Church, on the ground, Mr. Allbut states, now covered by the new police office.