grate has a cold, clammy, and murderous look; and when the waiter enters, you fancy that he has just been cut down. You light a cigar, and begin to think a little better of matters, and to reckon how many glasses of hot brandy-and-water would throw you into a state of oblivion—that is, leave you dead drunk until the dawning of another day. These thoughts vanish with a second glass, and you again venture forth, resolved this time to get into an omnibus, should one be found bold enough to venture out on such a day. After waiting for some time, and hailing by mistake half a dozen coal-wagons and carriers' carts, you perceive an omnibus creeping by at a snail's pace, enter, and squeeze yourself into a seat behind the door. You cannot see to the top of it for the fog, so have no fear of your tailor recognising you, should he happen to be inside-one comfort out of so many evils. While you are sitting, and congratulating yourself that you have escaped so well, up comes a cab-horse with his head through the open door, and his hot nostrils on your face. A few rough compliments are exchanged between the cab-driver and the conductor, during which something is said about the glanders, which haunts you for days after; the more so through your nose being red and raw by grazing it against the wall when the thief ran away with your watch. To what quarter the omnibus is going gives you no concern, for you are glad to get any where to be out of the way on such a day. Great, however, is your indignation, after having been carried some threescore yards, to find that you are at the Cross Keys, in Fleet-street, having got in at the corner of Bride-court, and that the omnibus goes no farther. You pay your threepence with a protest, and are thankful that you cannot see the passengers, who are laughing at you. You have, however, the satisfaction of seeing a heavy old gentleman plant one foot into a basket of oranges on the edge of the pavement, and that puts you into a little better humour, especially when, at the next step, he plunges his head into the window of a book-shop, and knocks down the middle of three rows of richly-bound volumes, besides smashing no end of panes of glass.

On such a day the man who milks his cow in the street is compelled to lay hold of her tail, for fear of losing sight of her; while the butcher-boy who carries out meat is often minus a joint or two when he reaches the door at which his orders ought to have been delivered. Should such a day be Smithfield market, all the cellarflaps in the little by-streets are left open, in the hopes of catching a few stray sheep, and having a stock of mutton for nothing; should a prize bullock tumble in, they make no bones of him, but salt down what is left, and bless the fog for supplying them with so much excellent beef.

A stranger to London, when the fog sets in at night, and he looks upon it for the first time, fancies his apartments filled with smoke, and begins by throwing open his doors and windows; thus making bad worse, by destroying all the warm air in the rooms. Even one well accustomed to the ins and outs of our far-stretching city is strangely deceived in distance, and the size objects assume, as they loom in dim and gigantic dimensions through the heavy fog. The gas-lamps appear as if placed three-story high, unless you stand close beneath them, for what light they emit is nearly all thrown upward; while a cab comes heaving up (to appearance) as large as the huge caravan which Wombwell formerly used for the conveyance of his stupendous elephant. Once take a wrong turning, and you may consider yourself very fortunate if you ever discover the right road again within three hours; for the houses wear a different appearance, and the streets appear to be all at "sixes and sevens."

Although a real Londoner looks upon a dense December fog as a common occurrence, and lights up his premises with as little ceremony as he would do at the close of the day, yet, to one unused to such a scene, there is something startling in the appearance of a vast city wrapt in a kind of darkness which seems neither to belong to the day nor the night, at the mid-noon hour, while the gas is burning in the windows of long miles of streets. The greatest marvel, after all, is that so few accidents happen in this dim, unnatural light, in the midst of which business seems to go on as usual, and would do, we believe, were the whole of London buried in midnight darkness at noonday, which would only be looked upon as a further deepening of the overhanging gloom. The number of lighted torches which are carried and waved at the corners and crossings of the streets add greatly to the wild and picturesque effect of the scene, as they flash redly upon the countenances of the passengers, and, in the distance, have the effect of a city enveloped in a dense mass of smoke, through which the smouldering flames endeavour in vain to penetrate.

During a heavy fog many accidents occur on the river, through barges running foul of each other, or vessels coming athwart the bridges; for there is no seeing the opening arch from the rock-like buttress, as the whole river looks like one huge bed of dense stagnant smoke, through which no human eye can penetrate. If you lean over the balustrades of the bridge, you cannot see the vessel which may at that moment be passing beneath, so heavy is the cloudy curtain which covers the water. At such times the steam-boats cease running, and rest quietly at their moorings, for the man at the wheel would be unable to see half the length of his vessel. Sometimes a steamer coming up the river takes a fancy to a shorter cut, by trying to clear

Blackwall Reach, and come overland through the marshes below Greenwich, or by running her head into the Isle of Dogs, where she lies aground until the next tide.

Many lives have been lost through foot-passengers mistaking the steps at the foot of some of the bridges for the opening of the bridge itself, and, ere they were aware of it, rolling head-foremost into the river. Strong iron-railings have been erected during the last few years, and have put an end to such dreadful accidents: at the foot of Blackfriars-bridge, many, we have heard, thus lost their lives.

At this time the pavement is greasy, and, though you keep lifting up your legs, you are hardly positive whether or not you are making any progress. You seem to go as much backward as forward; and some old Cockneys do aver that the surest way of reaching Temple-bar from Charing-cross would be to start off with your face turned towards King Charles's statue, to walk away manfully without once turning your head, and that, by the end of three hours, you would be pretty sure of reaching the point aimed at, should you not be run over.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE OLD BOROUGH OF SOUTHWARK.

F

HE first object that still strikes the eye when we have passed over into the Borough is the beautiful old church founded by a Saxon maiden called Mary of the Ferry, which in time was corrupted into Mary Overy, and is now called St. Saviour's. No young poet need wish for a finer subject to try his hand on than this beautiful half holy old legend of the Ferryman's Daughter, who, day after day, winter and summer, was seen with her quaint oldfashioned Saxon boat, ready to row passengers from the Borough to the City, and back again to the landing-place, where the Ferry-house had stood centuries before a bridge united the two shores. Pleasant to her ear must have been the lapping of the waves as they washed her little freehold, and fell with a dreamy murmuring upon the ear, while she sat revolving in her mind how she should begin to build a house for the reception of a few poor and pious sisters, in which they might live in content and comfort, and holy quiet; and when she was no more, there pray for the soul of Mary of the Ferry. And thus was the present St. Saviour's first founded. In this ancient cathedral-like church, Gower, the contemporary of Chaucer, lies buried; his beautiful monument still exists. Our own immortal Shakspeare was no doubt a mourner here two hundred years ago, on the last day of December, 1607, when in the forenoon he attended the funeral of his brother Edmund. Perhaps the funeral took place earlier in the day, on account of the merry-making which our forefathers held at the close of the old year, and kept up until the new year had grown far into the day; and that this was the cause why Edmund Shakspeare was buried in the church "with a forenoone knell of the great bell." Edmund was himself a player, and we can readily conjure up the images of those who witnessed his interment.

Were we to dwell upon the solemn memories which float around this hoary pile, they would alone fill this chapter; for Fletcher is buried here, so is Massinger; but not, as was supposed, "in a gloomy corner amid a mass of misshapen and melancholy graves," for he is buried "within the church."

But the spot to which the lover of poetry still directs his steps is to the Tabard-Chaucer's old inn, still standing on the very spot, if not the identical building itself, from which the father of English poetry set out, when he accompanied his merry pilgrims to Canterbury. The portion of this old hostelry still remaining dates much further back than the period of Charles II., a proof that it escaped the terrible fire which raged in Southwark in the year 1676. The very style of the building needs not a second glance to proclaim its antiquity; it is beyond doubt the very inn which the old chronicler Stowe mentions by the name of the "Tabard," and which he himself had no doubt seen in 1598, and called the "most ancient of the many fair inns in Southwark for receipt of travellers." The old sign of the Tabard formerly hung swinging and creaking across the road, and there were then no houses in front to shut it in, as now; it lay openly and temptingly, as when Chaucer's host, the merry "Harry Baily," stepped out in the front in the sunny mornings of Spring and Summer, to see what the old Kent and Newington roads were producing him, and what sort of customers were riding up.

Even now there is something venerable in the old weather-beaten and iron-bound posts which prop up its comparatively modern gateway; they tell of the grazing and grinding of thousands of old wheels, while the stones are worn away with the tramping of many a worn-out steed.

Merry doings were there in that old inn-yard, on an April morning, five hundred years ago, for Harry Baily, the host was

"The early cock

That gather'd them together in a flock."

And you might then have seen the Wife of Bath, leaning aside and listening as she sat in her saddle, for she could not hear very well, as she tells us Jankin, her fifth husband, had given her such a blow,

"For that she rent out of his book a leaf,

That of the stroke her ear was always deaf."

Let those who have never read Chaucer, and who wish to become acquainted with the most minute and beautiful painting of character which poetry ever produced, only read the Prologue to his Canterbury Tales; it scarcely occupies more than twenty moderate pages of print.