grace. In 1842 a chef d'oeuvre was dug out near the old Roman wall in Queen Street, Cheapside. It was the bronze stooping figure of an archer. It has silver eyes; and the perfect expression and anatomy display the highest art.
In 1825 a graceful little silver figure of the child Harpocrates, the God of Silence, looped with a gold chain, was found in the Thames, and is now in the British Museum. In 1839 a pair of gold armlets were dug up in Queen Street, Cheapside. In a kiln in St. Paul's Churchyard, in 1677, there were found lamps, bottles, urns, and dishes. Among other relics of Roman London drifted down by time we may instance articles of red glazed pottery, tiles, glass cups, window glass, bath scrapers, gold hairpins, enamelled clasps, sandals, writing tablets, bronze spoons, forks, distaffs, bells, dice, and millstones. As for coins, which the Romans seem to have hid in every conceivable nook, Mr. Roach Smith says that within twenty years upwards of 2,000 were, to his own knowledge, found in London, chiefly in the bed of the Thames. Only one Greek coin, as far as we know, has ever been met with in London excavations.
The Romans left deep footprints wherever they trod. Many of our London streets still follow the lines they first laid down. The river bank still heaves beneath the ruins of their palaces. London Stone, as we have already shown, still stands to mark the starting-point of the great roads that they designed. In a lane out of the Strand there still exists a bath where their sinewy youth laved their limbs, dusty from the chariot races at the Campus Martius at Finsbury. The pavements trodden by the feet of Hadrian and Constantine still lie buried under the restless wheels that roll over our City streets. The ramparts which the legionaries guarded have not yet crumbled to dust, though the rude people they conquered have themselves long since grown into conquerors. Roman London now exists only in fragments, invisible save to the prying antiquary. As the seed is to be found hanging to the root of the ripe wheat, so some filaments of the first germ of London, of the British hut and the Roman villa, still exist hidden under the foundations of the busy city that now teems with thousands of inhabitants. We tread under foot daily the pride of our old oppressors.
- CHAPTER II
- TEMPLE BAR.
Temple Bar — The Golgotha of English Traitors — When Temple Bar was made of Wood — Historical Pageants at Temple Bar — The Associations of Temple Bar — Mischievous Processions through Temple Bar — The First grim Trophy — Rye-House Plot Conspirators.
Temple Bar was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, in 1670-72, soon after the Great Fire had swept away eighty-nine London churches, four out of the seven City gates, 460 streets, and 13,200 houses, and had destroyed fifteen of the twenty-six wards, and laid waste 436 acres of buildings, from the Tower eastward to the Inner Temple westward.
The old black gateway, once the dreaded Golgotha of English traitors, separated, it should be remembered, the Strand from Fleet Street, the city from the shire, and the Freedom of the City of London from the Liberty of the City of Westminster. As Hatton (1708 — Queen Anne) says, — "This gate opens not immediately into the City itself, but into the Liberty or Freedom thereof." We need hardly say that nothing can be more erroneous than the ordinary London supposition that Temple Bar ever formed part of the City fortifications. Mr. Gilbert à Beckett, laughing at this tradition, once said in Punch: "Temple Bar has always seemed to me a weak point in the fortifications of London. Bless you, the besieging army would never stay to bombard it — they would dash through the barber's."
The Bar, after having been for many years a great obstruction to the traffic, was removed in the winter of 1877-8, whilst the New Law Courts were in process of erection. The Bar was of Portland stone, which London smoke alternately blackened and calcined; and each facade had four Corinthian pilasters, an entablature, and an arched pediment. On the west (Strand) side, in two niches, stood, as eternal sentries, Charles I. and Charles II., in Roman costume. Charles I. long ago lost his baton, as he once deliberately lost his head. Over the keystone of the central arch there used to be the royal arms. On the east side were James I. and Elizabeth (by many able writers supposed to be Anne of Denmark, the queen of James I.). She was pointing her white finger at Child's; while he, looking down on the passing cabs, seemed to say, "I am nearly tired of standing; suppose we go to Whitehall, and sit down a bit?"
These affected, mean statues, with their crinkly drapery, were the work of a vain, half-crazed sculptor, named John Bushnell, who died mad in 1701. Bushnell, who had visited Rome and
