The adjoining church of St. Helen was founded in 1216. What alteration it has undergone, it is difficult to point out. It is a rich storehouse of ancient monuments, and perhaps, with the exception of the little church in the Tower, abounds more in these valuable records than any other building in the City that escaped the Great Fire. Here, as we have before stated, the founder of Crosby Hall is interred. The same altar-tomb also contains the recumbent effigy of Ann his wife. Here Sir Thomas Gresham, the founder of the Royal Exchange, is also buried: he died in 1579. The "rich Spencer," who bought Crosby Hall, and was Lord Mayor in 1594, lies here: he is said to have been worth near a million of money in his day, a sum which, multiplied according to the value of the period, almost throws our Rothschilds into the shades. These are but a few of the many interesting monuments dedicated to the memory of the "grey forefathers" of the City. On one of the walls stands a richly-sculptured niche, below which runs a row of little open arches, through which the refractory nuns, it is said, were sentenced to hear mass, while they stood in the crypt. These nuns appear to have been an unruly race at times, and must often have caused great anxiety to such worthy prioresses as Alice Ashfield; for it was not safe to entrust them with the "latch-key," according to what is whispered by a dean of St. Paul's, who, it seems, made a few unpleasant inquiries about them in 1439, long before Crosby Hall was built, and when all around the nunnery there stood old-fashioned tenements, full of ins and outs, and which required some "sad (grave) woman and discreet" to "keep the keys of the posterngate." [Illustration: THE FOUR SWANS' INN YARD.] It may be that many of the citizens' daughters were only sent hither to be educated, and that they were not disciplined as rigidly as those who took the veil and vowed to lead a secluded life; if so, this will account for these little irregularities in those old devout days. We have in Bishopsgate-street one of those real old-fashioned London inns, with just such a yard and galleries as we may suppose were occupied by our early dramatists, while the stage was in its infancy. Our engraving requires no second glance to confirm the antiquity of the Four Swans Inn-yard. What merry masques have been played in that old open inn-yard--what beautiful forms have leant over that antique and pillared gallery! Oh, for a volume filled with the names and doings of those who have slept under that sloping roof--who have peeped through the old ancient bannisters of the wooden gallery! What saddling and mounting "in hot haste" must there have been in former times at the doors of those stables! What a tramping of feet on those spacious landing-places! What a staggering of jolly old Englishmen, who, when in their cups, went up those wide old-fashioned staircases.