altered.' This remarkable speech was delivered at a time when the rebuilding of the metropolis, after the Great Fire, was actively proceeding, and the most casual observer could not fail to realise how utterly inadequate to avert a catastrophe had been the wisdom of those who had set limits respected neither by the powers of nature nor by man. The city was indeed at that very time in the throes of a new birth; its old boundaries had been swept away, and out of the ashes of the picturesque but plague-haunted town of the past was rising up a new capital that was ere long to send forth outshoots in every direction, and eventually to absorb not only reluctant Putney, but many hamlets and villages even further afield than it. Another fifty years were to pass away before the bridge between Putney and Fulham was actually built, and according to tradition it was George II., when Prince of Wales, who brought about what was then considered an extraordinary innovation, impelled thereto by the inconvenience to which he was put when hunting in the Surrey forests an incidental illustration of the great change that has taken place since the sites of Putney, Wimbledon, Barnes, and Richmond were the haunts of wild animals that used to go down to the river to drink, and if sorely pressed in the chase, were able to swim over to the further side. Sir Robert Walpole, father of the more celebrated Horace, was entrusted with the onerous task of carrying {180} a bill through Parliament authorising the construction of the bridge, which was begun in 1727 and completed in 1729. It very quickly justified the predictions of its promoters, for in 1731 the revenue yielded by the tolls amounted to £1500 a year, a sum that was nearly doubled by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The tolls were not remitted until 1880, by which time the bridge was already in so lamentable a state of decay that it had to be pulled down. It was replaced by the present structure, which, though it cannot be called a work of art, has nothing unsightly about it, a commendation that cannot, unfortunately, be extended to the aqueduct of the Chelsea Waterworks that spans the stream a little higher up, and has done more to spoil the picturesque appearance of Fulham and Putney than anything else.