twenty arches, sixty feet high, and with rows of shops and dwelling-
houses on both its sides. Thence, along the broad and beautiful river,
were dotted here and there many stately mansions and villas, residences
of bishops and nobles, extending farther and farther west as the city
melted rapidly into the country. London itself was a town lying high
upon a hill--the hill of Lud--and consisted of a coil of narrow,
tortuous, unseemly streets, each with a black, noisome rivulet running
through its centre, and with rows of three-storied, leaden-roofed houses,
built of timber-work filled in with lime, with many gables, and with the
upper stories overhanging and darkening the basements. There were one
hundred and twenty-one churches, small and large, the most conspicuous of
which was the Cathedral. Old Saint Paul's was not a very magnificent
edifice--but it was an extremely large one, for it was seven hundred and
twenty feet long, one hundred and thirty broad, and had a massive
quadrangular tower, two hundred and sixty feet high. Upon this tower had
stood a timber-steeple, rising, to a height of five hundred and thirty-
four feet from the ground, but it had been struck by lightning in the
year 1561, and consumed to the stone-work.

The Queen's favourite residence was Greenwich Palace, the place of her
birth, and to this mansion, on the 9th of July, the Netherland envoys
were conveyed, in royal barges, from the neighbourhood of Pynchon-lane,
for their first audience.

The deputation was a strong one. There was Falck of Zeeland, a man
of consummate adroitness, perhaps not of as satisfactory integrity;
"a shrewd fellow and a fine," as Lord Leicester soon afterwards
characterised him. There was Menin, pensionary of Dort, an eloquent and
accomplished orator, and employed on this occasion as chief spokesman of
the legation--"a deeper man, and, I think, an honester," said the same