one sees and remembers when one comes up the River of London to London from the sea. So much, then, for the first layer. The second should by right be Roman: but nothing Roman remains; no, nor anything of the Dark Ages. Unless we believe what is probable enough, but not proved in any way, that the great containing walls of earth (notably that round the Isle of Dogs) were Roman work, we can distinguish nothing in such a journey to mark the first thousand years of Christendom. Far out beyond the Sea-reach, Reculvers was a Roman station in the estuary, but the ways have eaten it away. No great monastic nucleus of the Dark Ages could be founded in that inhospitable land. There was no palace of the kings standing near the central stream until the neighbourhood of London was approached. There was not even a fortress. Indeed it is odd to think how empty all that approach from the sea to the greatest of the western Roman towns was and remained. It was not until the Middle Ages began to flower that the Lower Thames put forth any human signs--at least of such a sort as have come down to us. The remains of them are very few, but they are distinctive. Of all that life of the Middle Ages which the English countrysides preserve in so many visible relics--and especially in a host of parish churches surpassing all of the kind in Europe--the Lower Thames has but one clear instance remaining to the eye; and that is the little isolated church of St. Clement’s. Rainham is too far from the water, the legends and associations surrounding the well of St. Chad are also too distant to count in the picture. The endowed foundations of religion either stood remote from the river-bank or have disappeared. London, but for the Great Fire, would have supplied in this the emptiness of the lower river. But for that capital accident in the history of the city, which renders London so different in outward aspect from all other great European towns, the Middle Ages would still break upon one in a sheaf of spires showing over the flats from Woolwich Reach, at least, and perhaps from farther down the stream. But that accident--the Great Fire of the seventeenth century--has left London stripped of the Gothic and, alone of the great capitals of Europe, no impress of our four hundred years of Gothic remains with the traveller as he comes upstream. When we consider the two parallels to London upon the Continent--the parallels I have chosen as ports upon the two great tidal rivers of the north-west--Antwerp and Rouen, the loss will be apparent. For miles and miles over the flats of the Scheldt the sailor making for Antwerp sees the high steeple upon his horizon fixed against the sky, and, late as was its building, this watch-tower of Antwerp is of the true Middle Ages; Europe was still Europe and one when its last stone was laid.