So late as 1831, Old London Bridge remained that, built in 1176, had thus for nearly seven hundred years borne the traffic to and from London, and had stood firmly centuries of storms and floods, and all the attacks of rebels from Norman to late Tudor times. Its career was closed on the 1st of August, 1831, when the new bridge, that had taken seven years in the building, was opened. The old bridge crossed the Thames at a point about a hundred feet to the eastward of the present one; the city approach leading steeply down a narrow street by Monument Yard, and passing close under the projecting clock of Saint Magnus the Martyr. The view was eminently picturesque, with the many and irregular pointed arches of the bridge; the rush of water in foaming cascades through the narrow openings; the weathered stonework, and the curious old oil-lamps; and the soaring Monument with the fantastic spire of St. Magnus, seen from Southwark, in the background. This was the aspect of Old London Bridge at any time between 1750, when the houses that had been for centuries standing on it were removed, and 1831, when the bridge itself was destroyed with pick and shovel. In previous ages there were gates both at the London and the Southwark ends, and on these fortified gateways were stuck the heads of many traitors to the State and martyrs to religious opinions. The heads of Sir William Wallace, Jack Cade, Bishop Fisher of Rochester, Sir Thomas More, and of many another, were once to be seen here; and in Queen Elizabeth's time, when John Visscher made a drawing of London Bridge, so many were the rotting skulls that the Southwark gate-house wore not so much the appearance of an entry into the capital of a civilised kingdom as that of a doorway to some Giant Blunderbore's bloodstained castle. [Illustration: THE "GEORGE."] [Sidenote: BRIDGE FOOT]