all the missionary societies working among the heathen. This is given in the way of money grants, large quantities of paper on which to print books and magazines, electrotypes to illustrate them, and various publications specially prepared for missionary work in nearly two hundred different languages and dialects. Upon this work the Society during the last year spent £44,486, that is 16,855 more than it received. This fact proves how baseless was the long since exploded idea that the subscriptions to the Society rendered it able to compete unfairly with the ordinary publisher. The truth is that the Society is more heavily weighted than the ordinary publisher. It is not simply a publishing house, able to issue any literature which will find a ready market. It exists to preach the Gospel by means of the printed page, and the constant aim of its publications is to set forth the way of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ by the inward working of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, the business pays the entire working expenses of both departments of the Society, and the profit remaining is generally nearly or quite equal to the free contributions of the Christian public in any given year. Thus the Society is the largest contributor to its own missionary enterprises, a result due to the enormous increase in the number of readers and to the successful way in which the officers of the Society for nearly a century have provided the kind of literature needed.

Our illustrations represent the premises of the Society, and also those of the British and Foreign Bible Society, another great religious literary enterprise, originated by the founders of the Religious Tract Society, and directly springing out of that good work. The Bible Society last year issued 3,677,204 copies of the whole or portions of the Bible in 290 different languages and dialects, and its total income from all sources was £113,870.

There are extant few, if any, houses in London now remaining associated with such great names as those of Chaucer, Caxton, and Shakespeare. With regard to the last, we know where certain buildings were situated with which he was connected, but there are only three still standing with which Shakespeare was familiar, and within which we may well believe him to have been, possibly many times. These are the Middle Temple Hall, where it may be considered certain that he witnessed the performance of Twelfth Night, already referred to; Crosby Hall, in Bishopsgate Street, which was occupied by the mother of his friend, Pembroke, and which the great dramatist has introduced into Richard III.; and St. Saviour's, Southwark, the church in which his brother Edmund was buried. Shakespeare was associated with Blackfriars Theatre, a site commemorated in the name Play-House Yard, and said to be now occupied by Apothecaries Hall; with the Globe Theatre, which stood on part of the site now occupied by Barclay and Perkins' Brewery; and the Mermaid Tavern, which stood in

Cheapside, and where he used to meet Ben Jonson, and other wits of his time.

Mr. W. J. Loftie, in his admirable History of London, thus refers to the great poet: 'The connection of William Shakespeare with Southwark is one of the most unquestionable facts in his biography. There was a second inn called the Boar's Head, in the High Street, immediately opposite the

THE OFFICES OF THE BRITISH AND FOREIGN BIBLE SOCIETY IN QUEEN VICTORIA STREET. east end of St. Saviour's Church. His brother Edmund was buried in the church in 1607. His theatre was the "Gloabe upon Banckside," to which reference has already been made. Close to it, but rather more to the westward, was the Rose, another theatre. A little further in the same direction were two "pits," for bear-baiting and bull-baiting, and the locality is still, or was very lately, known as the Bear Garden, and is so marked on many maps. Another old name still extant is that of the Falcon Dock,

close to which stood the Falcon Tavern, which is said to have been patronised by Shakespeare and his company. Paris Garden was exactly on the spot now covered by the southern approaches of Blackfriars Bridge. If the modern visitor, therefore, wishes to identify the place where Shakespeare played, he cannot do better than take the train from Charing Cross to Cannon Street, and when he has crossed the line of the Chatham and Dover Railway, he is in the region of Bankside. Looking toward the river, he will see St. Peter's Church, immediately beyond which, a little to the right, were the bull and bear pits. The train then crosses the Southwark Bridge Road, on the left hand side of which, looking from the railway, is Barclay and Perkins' Brewery. It covers the site, not only of the Globe, but also of the Rose, the Hope, and various other places of a similar kind, which existed here from before Shakespeare's time until all theatres were abolished by the Commonwealth.'

The engraving on page 48 shows the kind of house Michael Drayton, one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, lived in. No. 186 Fleet Street was the actual house, the front of which has been restored, that of its neighbour presenting much the same appearance now as when Ben Jonson frequented the Devil Tavern, which stood between the entrance to the Temple and Temple Bar, and upon the site of which, in 1788, the Child's Bank premises were built. Fuller records of him: He helped in the structure of Lincoln's Inn, where, having a trowel in his hand, he had a book in his pocket.' Tradition holds that it was upon the gate in Chancery Lane, still (1890) in existence-though also living a threatened life—and represented on page 206, that Jonson worked as a bricklayer. Belonging to an earlier generation, John Fox, the martyrologist, is connected with one of the loftiest geniuses that have enriched English poetry, and with a street not now desirable for its literary associations. Fox wrote his noted work when living in Grub Street, now Milton Street, situated in the parish of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, between Fore Street and Chiswell Street, and defined by Dr. Johnson: Grub Street, the name of a street in London much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called "Grub Street." Fox is also said to have held the living of St. Giles', and is buried in the church, where lie also the remains of John Milton, poet, statesman, scholar, and Puritan, a man who belonged to London by birth, by education, and by the fact that he spent in it most of his days, and that there the bulk of his life work was accomplished.

In Bread Street, Cheapside, was situated the Spread Eagle, as the house was called in which he was born, December 9th, 1608, and in Allhallows' Church, represented on page 32, he was baptized on December 20th. He, like the old gossip Samuel Pepys, received his early education at St. Paul's School, in the buildings swept away by the Great Fire. After his

university training and Continental travel he lodged in St. Bride's Churchyard, the back of the office of Punch is said now to occupy the site. This was in

1640. Not liking the neighbourhood, he migrated to Aldersgate Street, but no trace of that house remains. It was to this house that, in 1643, he brought his bride, Mary Powell, she being seventeen, he thirty-five, the discrepancy in age being nearly sufficient of itself to account for a good deal of what followed. In 1645 he removed to a house in the Barbican; thither his wife, after a two years' separation, returned to him. In 1647 he removed to Lincoln's Inn Fields, and then, while Latin Secretary to the Council of State, 1649–1652, he lived at Charing Cross and in Whitehall. In 1652 he removed to a house in Petty France, Westminster, now No. 19 York Street, Westminster. Here Milton lived for eight years, and in later days it was occupied by William Hazlitt. It was here that the great affliction of his life came upon him, the partial gradually changing into total darkness. Here his wife died, leaving him a widower with three daughters, Anne, Mary and Deborah, the eldest eight, the second six years old, and the third an infant. In 1656 he married Catherine Woodcock, but fifteen months later she died. 'Fancy,' writes Milton's great biographer, Masson, 'in the house in Petty France, the blind father, a kind of stern King Lear, mostly by himself, and the three young things pattering about as noiselessly as possible at their own will, or in charge of some servant! It was to be tragic in the end both for him and for them.' At the Restoration, Milton retired into hiding in Bartholomew Close, and after his pardon in December, 1660, he dwelt first