Strand--Wellington Street--intimately associated with Dickens by the
building which formerly contained the offices of _Household Words_ and the
London chambers of Dickens' later years.

Blackfriars Bridge follows immediately after the Temple Gardens, but,
unlike Waterloo or the present London Bridge, is a work so altered and
disfigured from what the architect originally intended, as to be but a
slummy perversion of an inanimate thing, which ought really to be
essentially beautiful and elegant as useful.

At this point was also the _embouchement_ of the "Fleet," suggestive of
irregular marriages and the Fleet Prison, wherein Mr. Pickwick "sat for
his picture," and suffered other indignities.

As Dickens has said in the preface to "Pickwick," "legal reforms have
pared the claws by which a former public had suffered." The laws of
imprisonment for debt have been altered, and the Fleet Prison pulled down.

A little further on, up Ludgate Hill, though not really in the Thames
district, is the "Old Bailey," leading to "Newgate," whereon was the
attack of the Gordon Rioters so vividly described in Chapter LXIV. of
"Barnaby Rudge." The doorway which was battered down at the time is now in
the possession of a London collector, and various other relics are
continually finding their way into the salesroom since the entire
structure was razed in 1901.

[Illustration: LONDON BRIDGE.]

Southwark Bridge, an ordinary enough structure of stone piers and iron
arches, opened another thoroughfare to South London, between Blackfriars
and the incongruous and ugly pillar known as the Monument, which marks the
starting-point of the great fire of 1666, and is situated on the northerly
end of the real and only "London Bridge" of the nursery rhyme.

As recorded, it actually did fall down, as the result of an unusually high
tide in 1091. As the historian of London Bridge has said, "a magnificent
bridge is a durable expression of an ideal in art, whether it be a simple
arch across an humble brook, or a mighty structure across a noble river."

The history of London Bridge is a lengthy account of itself, and the
period with which we have to deal carries but a tithe of the lore which
surrounds it from its birth.

It was said by Dion Cassius that a bridge stood here in the reign of
Claudius, but so far into antiquity is this (44 A. D.), that historians in
general do not confirm it. What is commonly known as "Old London Bridge,"
with its hou