Farther down Bishopsgate Street, is the tiny church of St. Ethelburga, uninteresting as regards its interior, but one of the oldest existing churches in London, and certainly the smallest. It escaped the ravages of the Great Fire, and history mentions it as early as 1366. I passed it three times without noticing it, for its little spirelet rises but slightly above the roofs of the intervening shops, and its tiny doorway, labelled itself like a small shop, is easily overlooked between two projecting windows. (The smallness of the place can be imagined from the fact that, only a few doors from it, no one can be found to direct you to it.) The verger lives in a very picturesque and overhanging slum-alley close by; though his abode suggests Fagin, he is, nevertheless, an amiable and obliging gentleman.
Just east of Bishopsgate is Houndsditch (its somewhat unpleasantly suggestive name commemorating the ancient City moat), with, near by, the Jewish quarter of St. Mary Axe, "Rag Fair," and Petticoat Lane (now Middlesex Street), noted, like Brick Lane, Spitalfields, for its Sunday morning markets. Why is the Jewish quarter so invariably concerned with old clothes? As the rhyme says:
"Jews of St. Mary Axe, of jobs so wary
That for old clothes they'd even axe St. Mary."
Close by Houndsditch is Bevis Marks (Bury's Marks), now descended from its ancient glories; it used to contain the City mansion, "fair courts and garden plots," of the Abbots of Bury St. Edmunds, but now principally recalls Dickens's unsavoury characters, Miss Sally Brass and her brother Sampson (in The Old Curiosity Shop). Here, once again, Dickens gets thoroughly the strange, semi-human spirit of London slums and by-ways; it is in such places that his genius attains its highest flights. That he was always, too, very careful as regarded his details, is shown in a letter on this subject to his friend Forster. He spent (he says), a whole morning in Bevis Marks, selecting:
"the office window, with its threadbare green curtain all awry; its sill just above the two steps which lead from the side-walk to the office door, and so close on the footway that the passenger who takes the wall brushes the dim glass with his elbow."
It seems, however, almost too invidious to select special rambles. For, the whole of this heart of the city,—except only for certain well-defined "infernos" of modern industry and ugliness, such as the great Liverpool-Street terminus, must be deeply interesting to every Londoner and every Englishman. Even in comparatively dull streets, lined with warehouses and offices, there will always be some little oasis to rest and refresh the wanderer. Suppose that, instead of going up Cornhill, you take another wheel-spoke from the Mansion-House; say Lombard-Street, the home par excellence of the bankers. This street is solid and stately, as you would expect; the very name has a moneyed ring about it! The derivation of the name, by-the-way, is curious; it comes from Lombard bankers who appear to have settled here at an early date; the street bore their name in the reign of Edward II. The square tower, crowned by an octagonal spire, that rises on the north side of Lombard Street, is that of the church of St. Edmund the King and Martyr, in which was made poor Addison's not too happy marriage with the Dowager Countess of Warwick and Holland. Still continuing east, past Gracechurch Street, we come to Fenchurch Street, a thoroughfare that runs parallel with the busy mart of Eastcheap, famed in Shakespeare, and possibly no less dirty and noisy than it was in Dame Quickly's time. Out of Fenchurch Street opens Mincing Lane, a name that commemorates the "minchens" or nuns of St. Helen's; that convent owned a great deal of property about here. The Clothworkers' Hall, close by, is reached through an iron gate; its garden, or court, is formed by the ancient churchyard of All Hallows, Staining, a church destroyed, all but its tower, by the Great Fire, and not rebuilt. The tower of All Hallows, a stranded fragment of antiquity, forms the centre piece of the garden court, where its effect is most curious and striking.
The narrow old streets that lead north out of Cheapside, the "Chepe" of the middle ages, with their quaint old names, afford many pleasant rambles. In Wood Street, the old plane-tree, still standing, recalls Wordsworth's poem. Milk Street leads by the old church of St. Mary Aldermanbury, with the statue of Shakespeare in its little churchyard, to the still visible bastions of London Wall, and along the street of that name, to Cripplegate. The church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, is interesting; its churchyard, too, is a green and favoured spot. A street of warehouses near it was burned down quite recently with terrible loss, and the church itself was threatened, but fortunately escaped; but the streets, now rebuilt, look, thanks to the City's wonderful recuperative powers, as solid and as flourishing as ever. The noisy thoroughfare of Fore Street, lined with warehouses and foundries, is built upon the ancient line of wall, which also appears, black against sunflowers, asters, and greenery, in St. Giles's churchyard and rectory garden. This part of the City wall is probably of Edward IV.'s time. Portions of the old Roman wall have indeed been discovered here and there in the City; a large fragment of it was, for instance, laid bare at the building of the new departments of the General Post Office in 1891. But the oldest fragments of wall existing near Cripplegate are, though black, grimy, and mouldering, probably Norman or Saxon. Roman relics that have been discovered in the City are on view, some at the Guildhall, others in the British Museum; the most interesting of them all, however, is still in situ, being the large fragment called "London Stone," built into St. Swithin's Church opposite the Cannon Street Terminus; supposed to be a "milliarium," or milestone, and possibly, like the golden milestone in the Roman Forum, "a central mark whence the great Roman roads radiated all over England."
The street called "London Wall" testifies to the care of the City for its ancient monuments. The ruins of the old fortifications are carefully built up, embanked, and made picturesque by a narrow strip of greenery that was once the churchyard of St. Alphage over the way. They are railed in from injury, and a memorial tablet is affixed. The dwellers in the district still, however, seem densely ignorant as to its meaning. I lately asked several youthful inhabitants, engaged in the fascinating pavement game of "hop-scotch," what they supposed the place was. They could not answer. The School Board, if rumour speaks truly, is surely doing well to include the history of London in its curriculum.
The street of London Wall has the distinction of possessing the very ugliest church in the metropolis, that of St. Alphage. It has, indeed, the one merit of being so small as easily to escape notice; though hardly its ancient foundation, or the interesting monument inside it to Lord Mayor Sir Rowland Hayward's two wives and sixteen "happy children," redeem it from utter dreariness.
But we must now desist from our rambles, though there is yet much to see; night is falling; that mysterious night that brings such strange contrast to the City streets; the wild, fitful fever of their long day is ended, and they are left to silence. The busy throng of workers hurries homeward; soon, in the highways scarcely a belated footfall resounds, while in the byways, by day so crowded, there reigns a calm as of the sea at rest; like the sea's, too, is that faint, unceasing tremor of the great City, the City that never sleeps. To quote the poet of "Cockaigne":