ses, its shops, and its chapels, a good idea of which is
obtained from the sixth plate of Hogarth's "Marriage a la Mode," was a
wonderfully impressive thing in its day, and would be even now, did its
like exist.

The structures which roofed the bridge over, as it were, were pulled down;
and various reparations made from time to time preserved the old structure
until, in 1824, was begun the present structure, from the designs of
Rennie, who, however, died before the work was begun. It was opened by
William IV. and Queen Adelaide in 1831, and occupies a site two hundred or
more feet further up the river than the structure which it replaced, the
remains of which were left standing until 1832. Thus it is likely enough
that Dickens crossed and recrossed this famous storied bridge, many times
and oft, when his family was living in Lant Street, in Southwark, while
the father of the family was languishing in the iron-barred Marshalsea.

As Laurence Sterne has truly said, "Matter grows under one's hands. Let no
man say, 'Come, I'll write a duodecimo.'" And so with such a swift-flowing
itinerary as would follow the course of a river, it is difficult to get,
within a reasonably small compass, any full resume of the bordering
topography of the Thames. All is reminiscent, in one way or another, of
any phase of London life in any era, and so having proceeded thus far on
the voyage without foundering, one cannot but drop down with the tide, and
so to open sea.

Below the metropolis of docks and moorings the river widens to meet the
sea, so that any journey of observation must perforce be made upon its
bosom rather than as a ramble along its banks.

Blackwall, with its iron-works; Woolwich, with its arsenal; and Greenwich,
with its hospital and observatory, are all landmarks by which the
traveller to London, by sea, takes his reckoning of _terra firma_.

The shipping of the Orient, the Baltic, the Continent, or the mere
coaster, with that unique species of floating thing, the Thames barge, all
combine in an apparently inextricable tangle which only opens out in the
estuary below Gravesend, which, with its departed glory and general air of
decay, is the real casting-off point of seagoing craft. Here the
"mud-pilot," as the river pilot is locally known, is dropped, and the
"channel pilot" takes charge, and here last leave-takings are said and
last messages left behind.

Opposite Gravesend, from where Dickens first set sail for Ameri