But these are matters for discussion in weightier works than mine. Here I merely skim the surface, and catch the superficial fact.
For instance, I observe that London's growth is steadily destroying London's picturesqueness. The embowered palaces of dukes and earls are giving place, more or less, to workmen's model dwellings; and the spots, such as Charing Cross and Tower Hill, where kings and princes were formerly decapitated in a gentlemanly way, never rise nowadays beyond the breaking of the crowns of rude and clamorous agitators.
Nowhere, in short, is Democracy advancing so visibly as in London; nowhere is it so manifestly pushing back, and crawling over, and supplanting Aristocracy.
Southwark's palaces have been famous for hundreds of years. St. Saviour's Church, where the bones of Fletcher and Massinger and Edmond Shakespeare are laid, was built on the site of a church built before the Norman Conquest, from the profits of a ferry across the Thames. Anne Boleyn had an abode here, and hither rode the enterprising Royal Henry to walk and talk with her. Elizabeth came by water with the French Ambassador to see the bull-baiting in the building near the Globe Theatre.
A famous old London tavern, the Tabard, from which Chaucer's nine-and-twenty pilgrims started on their journey, stood near London Bridge within living memory. In Southwark too, until our time, stood the galleried inn where Mr. Pickwick discovered Sam Weller. In fact, Southwark was, until our time, full of historical associations, and once ranked amongst London's most fashionable suburbs. Now it is a labyrinth of slums, and Barclay & Perkins' brewery occupies the site of the Bankside Globe Theatre.
The narrow thoroughfares between the Strand and the river, where modern provincial visitors have their caravanserais, rustled once with fashionable satins and groaned under the weight of gilded coaches. Here dwelt dukes and earls and the pick of our nobility. Mark Twain, in _The Prince and the Pauper_, has pictured for us a Royal river pageant, such as many bright and flashing eyes must have beheld from the windows and steps of the palaces that lined the Strand or Middlesex bank of the Thames between London and Westminster, for the king's town residence stood hard by in Whitehall; and thence to his country palace at Greenwich--Elizabeth's favourite "Manner of Pleasaunce"--the richly caparisoned and silk-canopied State barges fluttered splendidly.