Milton used to thank God that he had been born in London. Shakespeare acted in Blackfriars and near London Bridge; his wit flashed nightly at the Mermaid; in the shadow of Whitehall, he broke his heart for Mary Fitton; and here he wove the magic of his plays. That is the consideration which makes London's enchantment so irresistible. Here is the actual, visible scene of the most momentous deeds of our history, of the most memorable episodes in our country's fiction, and of the workaday, toiling, rejoicing, and sorrowing of the greatest of our English brothers and sisters. At Charing Cross the statue of Charles I. on his Rabelais horse faces the site of the scaffold "in the open street," on to which the king stepped one morning through a window of his palace of Whitehall. Pepys saw General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered at Charing Cross, he (Harrison) "looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition." And he gravely adds that Sir Harry Vane, about to be beheaded on Tower Hill, urgently requested the executioner to take off his head so as not to hurt a pimple on his neck. [Illustration: STRAND CROSS, COVENT GARDEN, &c. ANNO 1647.] Trooper Lockyer, a brave young soldier of seven years' service, though only twenty-three years old, having helped to seize General Cromwell's colours at the Bull in Bishopsgate, was shot in Paul's Churchyard by grim Oliver's orders. His crime was that he was a Leveller or early Socialist, "with hot notions as to human freedom, and the rate at which millenniums are obtainable. He falls shot in Paul's Churchyard on Friday, amid the tears of men and women," says Carlyle, Paul's Cathedral being then a horse-guard, with horses stamping in the canons' stalls, and its leaden roof melted into bullets. On the following Monday the corpse having been "watched and wept over" meantime "in the eastern regions of the City," brave Lockyer was buried "at the new churchyard in Westminster":-- The corpse was adorned with bundles of Rosemary, one half stained with blood. . . . Some thousands followed in rank and file: all had sea-green and black ribbon tied on their hats and to their breasts; and the women brought up the rear. How actual and visible and present they are, as one stands on the spots where these great events were transacted! And such histories has nearly every street and every ancient building. London is not paved with gold. It is paved with the glory of England's mighty dead. * * * * * The name is Legion of the eminences whose last cumbrous clog of clay is buried here.