Corner to Charing Cross, all is utterly uninteresting: then history begins. We have the feudal state in the gloomy and Gothic grandeur of Northumberland House; we pass along the Strand, where Jack Cade pursued his brief triumph—the prototype of every popular insurrection unbased on any great principle—sudden, cruel, and useless! We have the last fine speech of Lord Scales in our ears,—
"Ah, countrymen! if, when you make your prayers,
God should be so obdurate as yourselves,
How would it fare with your departed souls?"
and the green solitude of the Temple garden is the very place to muse upon his words. We leave the crowded street behind: we linger for a moment beside the little fountain, the sweetest that
Ever sang the sunny hours away,
Or murmured to the moonlit hours of love.
It is, I believe, our only fountain, and all the associations of a fountain are poetical. It carries us to the East, and the stately halls of the caliphs rise on the mind's eye; and we
