Returning once more to BRIDGE STREET, we must pause awhile at ST. MICHAEL’S CHURCH, standing at the north-east angle of this street and Pepper Street. A Church existed here, in connexion with a Monastery of the same name, almost coëval with the Conquest. In the year 1178, John de Lacy, constable of Chester, whose ancestor Roger de Lacy had devised the _Monastery of St. Michael_ to the Prior of Norton, gave a messuage adjoining this church to the Abbot of Stanlaw. Two years afterwards, viz., on Mid-lent Sunday 1180, this Church and monastery were, with a large portion of the city, destroyed by fire; and Bradshaw the poet-monk assures us, doubtless “on the best authority,” that if it had not been for the virtues attaching to the holy shrine of St. Werburgh, the whole city would have then “lain in dust and ashes!” He that hath faith enough to remove mountains, let him swallow this also—_we_ are confessedly an infidel. The _Monastery_ does not appear to have been rebuilt after the Great Fire; but of the _Church_ frequent mention is made in old charters and deeds. It has been several times rebuilt—the last time in 1849–50—so that it is, at this moment, the newest ecclesiastical edifice in the city. Mr. James Harrison, the architect of the Savings Bank and Music Hall, furnished the plans and elevations for the present Church of St. Michael. [Picture: St. Michael’s Church, and Lecture Hall] Perhaps the best view we can have of ST. MICHAEL’S CHURCH is from a little way down Bridge Street, just opposite to that useful building, the NEW LECTURE HALL. Chester has long stood in need of a room for such purposes, moderate in dimensions, and conveniently situate; and Dr. Norton, the proprietor of the new LECTURE HALL, has laudably ministered to that want, by providing a public room admirably adapted, from its size and situation, for popular lectures and musical entertainments. Our illustration embraces a view both of the LECTURE HALL and of ST. MICHAEL’S CHURCH. Just behind where we have been standing is a curious relic of the timber architecture of Chester—the Falcon Inn. A few yards higher up than the Falcon, the street was for nearly two centuries blocked up by a strange-looking timber building, erected by Randle Holme in 1655, called the OLD LAMB ROW. While this house was in being it was the greatest curiosity of its kind in the city; but in 1821, the decaying timbers suddenly parted from their bearings, and the entire pile fell in with a great crash, to the unspeakable relief of the pent-up thoroughfare, but to the great chagrin and regret of the antiquary. We are now descending LOWER BRIDGE STREET, which abounds, on either side, with those queer-looking tenements, not to be met with in such numbers and variety in any other city but Chester. Here is one with the date 1603, evidently the residence, in its earliest days, of some Cestrian magnate long since “returned to his dust.”