tor of the customs would have brought me acquainted with
merchants of whom I hear no great character. The streets are as crowded
as London, but the best image I can give you of it is, 'tis as if
Wapping and Southwark were ten times as big, or all their people ran
into London. Nothing is fine in it but the square, which is larger than
Grosvenor Square, and well builded, with a very fine brass statue in the
middle of King William on horseback; and the key, which is full of
ships, and goes round half the square. The College Green is pretty and
(like the square) set with trees. There is a cathedral, very neat, and
nineteen parish churches."

[Illustration: STEEP STREET, NOW PULLED DOWN.]

It is quite as curious to note what Pope omits as what he mentions. He
is much taken with a commonplace square, and with the mingling of ships
and houses (which is truly effective), but the modern traveller would
find the chief beauty of the city in its Gothic architecture, to which
Pope gives one line--"a cathedral, very neat, and nineteen parish
churches." Let the visitor ascend any one of the hills which overhang
Bristol, and a beautiful scene at once bursts upon his view: this is due
to the pre-eminent beauty of the church-towers, the great stone lilies
of the fifteenth century soaring above the dingy town; each,

For holy service built, with high disdain
Surveys this lower stage of earthly gain;

and a hard struggle they have to hold their own against the menacing
chimney-stacks of manufacturing England. All the poetry and aspiration
of the past seems contending, shoulder to shoulder, in thick air with
the material interests of the present.

Strolling about through the grimy streets, one's eye is caught by the
sign "Quakers' Friars," and following up the narrow court to seek the
meaning of this odd combination of opposing ideas, one comes to the
Friends' school, occupying the remnant of a former priory of Black
Friars. It is a spot intimately associated with recollections of the
early Friends. In 1690 the father of Judge Logan of Pennsylvania was
master of this school. Adjoining the school is the Friends'
meeting-house, built in 1669 on what was then an open space near the
priory, where George Fox often preached; and within the walls of the
meeting-house this Quaker father took upon himself the state of
matrimony. A local bard is inspired to sing:

Many years ago, six hundred or so,
The Dominican monks had a p