whether some new beauty had not come to Court; and, probably, on the part of the Committee, sharpened by an uneasy recollection of a certain fine equestrian statue in white marble upon which they had turned their backs. This was a statue of the King on horseback, and it was offered by Sir Robert Vyner to stand in the middle of the Quadrangle. The Committee, however, came to the conclusion that it was too big for the site and would interfere with the main business of the building, which was the transaction of business by the merchants of the City. Charles the Second was not a man to take with humility any disregard for his Royal dignity, and it is quite possible that, with a chuckle of pleasure, he left his good citizens to wait for him on the Royal Exchange as a lesson to them in the future. The quadrangle, however, was not long to be deprived of the patronage of his presence, for a statue of him by Grinling Gibbons, in the dress of a Roman Emperor, with a laurel wreath on his head and a truncheon in his hand, was set up in the centre fifteen years later. This statue you may still see in a niche in the south-east corner of the third Royal Exchange: while its own brother, a statue in bronze of James the Second in the same remarkable garb, by the same artist, still stands chillily in the open air with its back to the red Admiralty building, and looks across St. James’s Park towards Buckingham Palace. It cannot be said that, beautiful in its architecture as the second Royal Exchange was, the building held the same importance as the first Exchange had done in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Social conditions were changing quickly in England. Coffee houses sprang into a rapid popularity and the merchants drifted to them more and more for the interchange of business. The shops became difficult to let and rents dwindled away. Over the Exchange there came to hang an air of disuse and squalor. The frequenters in the time of Queen Anne are thus described by the “Spectator”: “Instead of the assembly of honourable merchants, substantial tradesmen and knowing masters of shops, the mumpers, the halt, the lame and the blind or vendors of trash--apples, plums....” A little further on he tells us “the benches are so filthy that no one could sit down, yet the Beadles at Christmas have the impudence to ask for their boxes though they deserve strapado.” This is a far cry from those gaily lighted galleries where of an evening the gallants of Queen Elizabeth’s day used to loiter. Fashion had moved to the West--chiefly because fashion had been in banishment upon the Continent during the Commonwealth--and when it returned with Charles the Second into England, it found its houses already occupied.