Facts such as these, however, bid us remember that even the relics of the past are passing away, and that cities, unlike human creatures, may grow to be so old that at last they will become new. It is not wonderful that London should change its aspect from one decade to another, as the living surmount and obliterate the dead. Thomas Sutton's Charter-House School, founded in 1611, when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were still writing, was reared upon ground in which several thousand corses were buried, during the time of the Indian pestilence of 1348; and it still stands and nourishes--though not as vigorously now as might be wished. Nine thousand new houses, it is said, are built in the great capital every year, and twenty-eight miles of new street are thus added to it. On a Sunday I drove for three hours through the eastern part of London without coming upon a single trace of the open fields. On the west, all the region from Kensington to Richmond is settled for most part of the way; while northward the city is stretching its arms toward Hampstead, Highgate, and tranquil and blooming Finchley. Truly the spirit of this age is in strong contrast with that of the time of Henry the Eighth when (1530), to prevent the increasing size of London, all new buildings were forbidden to be erected "where no former hath been known to have been." The march of improvement nowadays carries everything before it: even British conservatism is at some points giving way: and, noting the changes that have occurred here within only five years, I am persuaded that those who would see what remains of the London of which they have read and dreamed--the London of Dryden and Pope, of Addison, Sheridan, and Byron, of Betterton, Garrick, and Edmund Kean--will, as time passes, find more and more difficulty both in tracing the footsteps of fame, and in finding that sympathetic, reverent spirit which hallows the relics of genius and renown. Illustration: "Church Steeple Centered on Moon" CHAPTER XIV OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON