terpret the emblem of British nationality. Having erected such memorials, or emphasized in similar ways the scenes and characters of their noble history, Englishmen are then likely to leave the virtues or events of their past to the silent if keenly sensitive judgment of posterity. Even such merely outward remembrance is often strangely lacking, and is perhaps as apt to find expression in London through the names of streets, as in a more directly local form. And in no city in the world is there such endless repetition and combination of street-names, which, without suggesting poverty of resource, makes the pilgrim's progress through them at times a harassing struggle. Commemoration by anniversary celebrations here, if not quite a thing unknown, is certainly an unfamiliar practice. The contrast with their mercurial neighbors and hereditary foemen, the French, is most marked in this respect. What history has not been made and unmade on this little island, and how crowded it is with great names and deeds! Perhaps if each of England's dead sons who is worthy of public recognition had a day thus set apart, there would not be days enough in the calendar of the round year to suffice.

Two royal equestrian statues stand in either direction from the Nelson Column. George IV. is in bronze to the north; and just to the south Charles I. looks steadfastly down towards Whitehall. The latter statue is on the very spot where stood the last cross of Queen Eleanor, Edward's chère reine, who some fondly think gave the name to Charing, though more likely it was the name of an ancient village here. And further it is the site on which the regicides of Charles I. suffered death. As we go forward in the direction of his gaze, it is once more to leave modernity, and to approach the scenes of historic Westminster, coeval with the life of the Tower and of an earlier St. Paul's. Northumberland House, the great lion-surmounted mansion of the Percys, stood till lately between here and Charing Cross Bridge, where now great hotels and railways confuse the senses. The fine Water Gate of York House, built by James I. for "Steenie," Duke of Buckingham, and in which Sir Francis Bacon was born, still stands near the river; and our own Benjamin Franklin lived for some time just here in Craven Street. No reader of criminal annals or of contemporaneous history is ignorant of Scotland Yard,

the famous headquarters of the London police, whose modest buildings also stand on the south side of Whitehall, on a bit of land owned centuries ago by Scottish kings. Opposite, just beyond the Admiralty, is a little, low building, with a clock-tower, once only a guard-house for the palace of Whitehall, but now the quaint office of the commander-inchief, and known, under the modest name of the Horse Guards, as the headquarters of the British army. A splendid cavalry troop of Life Guards is always visibly on duty on this side of the building, and equally redoubtable infantry patrol the other, where the colors are trooped; and there we saw a detachment of the famous Coldstream Guards, as they set out across its parade ground to march on their nightly errand to stand guard over the treasures of the Bank of England. Just beyond, as we go south, rise the Treasury and the massive Renaissance public offices, where the Prime Minister and the governmental departments over which the British Cabinet is set are ensconced. In the ante-chamber to the office of the Premier in the unpretentious building close at hand (now historic, but I fear soon to be removed), Wellington and

Nelson had their only meeting, each waiting to see the Minister, and each personally unknown to the other. The buildings are on either side of Downing Street (which has given its name to the whole political quarter), and look out at the back on the waters of St. James's Park, by the side of the offices of the Venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, to whose fostering care American Christianity owes so great a debt.

But step again across Whitehall (which formerly was spanned by Holbein's gateway), and you shall see all that is left of what was once York Place, the palace of Wolsey, Archbishop of the see of York, whose proud career here suffered disgrace. Later it was christened Whitehall, and was rebuilt by Henry VIII., and again by James I. At one time and another all but the Palladian Banqueting Hall has been swallowed up in flames; and this part was converted by George I. into the dismal Royal Chapel, which still it is. Henry VIII. first met Anne Boleyn at Whitehall, and here the royal monster died. Its grounds were then enormous in extent; and Henry commissioned Inigo Jones to build a palace which,

had the plan been carried out, would have been as large as Versailles. Elizabeth went hence by water to the Tower, and came back here to reign as Queen of England. Through an opening between the central windows of the present street-front Charles I. stepped firmly to the neighboring scaffold, - a semiobstructive, semi-pathetic, at the last a wholly heroic figure. It was not for much longer a palace, but long enough to shelter Oliver Cromwell and Milton, his secretary, and to witness the death of the Protector. Long enough, too, to witness the orgies of the Restoration and the death of the Merry Monarch, Charles II.; and then fire all but destroyed it, and St. James's took its place. Behind it, in Whitehall Gardens, Disraeli lived for a time; and Sir Robert Peel was carried to his town house there, to die. Whitehall is now for its whole length a broad avenue, and Parliament Street, to which it leads, has been much widened from its former estate. Still further demolition is anticipated to sweep away buildings which prevent a thoroughly dignified approach to Parliament Square, of which only glimpses are now vouchsafed at a distance. But how marked the advance over former days, for,