As the wanderer writes these words he hears the plashing of the fountains in Trafalgar Square and the evening chimes that peal out from the spire of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and he knows himself once more at the shrine of his youthful dreams. Illustration: "St. Paul's from Maiden Lane." To the observant stranger in London few sights can be more impressive than those that illustrate the singular manner in which the life of the present encroaches upon the memorials of the past. Old Temple Bar has gone,--a sculptured griffin, at the junction of Fleet Street and the Strand, denoting where once it stood. (It has been removed to Theobald's Park, near Waltham, and is now the lodge gate of the grounds of Sir Henry Meux.) The Midland Railway trains dash over what was once St. Pancras churchyard--the burial-place of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and of many other British worthies--and passengers looking from the carriages may see the children of the neighbourhood sporting among the few tombs that yet remain in that despoiled cemetery. Dolly's Chop-House, intimately associated with the wits of the reign of Queen Anne, has been destroyed. The ancient tavern of The Cock, immortalised by Tennyson, in his poem of Will Waterproof's Monologue, is soon to disappear,--with its singular wooden vestibule that existed before the time of the Plague and that escaped the great fire of 1666. On the site of Northumberland House stands the Grand Hotel. The gravestones that formerly paved the precinct of Westminster Abbey have been removed, to make way for grassy lawns intersected with pathways. In Southwark, across the Thames, the engine-room of the brewery of Messrs. Barclay & Perkins occupies the site of the Globe Theatre, in which most of Shakespeare's plays were first produced. One of the most venerable and beautiful churches in London, that of St. Bartholomew the Great,--a gray, mouldering temple, of the twelfth century, hidden away in a corner of Smithfield,--is desecrated by the irruption of an adjacent shop, the staircase hall of which breaks cruelly into the sacred edifice and impends above the altar. On July 12, 1882, the present writer, walking in the churchyard of St. Paul's, Covent Garden,--the sepulchre of William Wycherley, Robert Wilks, Charles Macklin, Joseph Haines, Thomas King, Samuel Butler, Thomas Southerne, Edward Shuter, Dr. Arne, Thomas Davies, Edward Kynaston, Richard Estcourt, William Havard, and many other renowned votaries of literature and the stage,--found workmen building a new wall to sustain the enclosure, and almost every stone in the cemetery uprooted and leaning against the adjacent houses. Those monuments, it was said, would be replaced; but it was impossible not to consider the chances of error in a new mortuary deal--and the grim witticism of Rufus Choate, about dilating with the wrong emotion, came then into remembrance, and did not come amiss. Illustration: "The Charter House."