By the side of the house is an approach to the river:  most of the buildings near are old and irregular, and at low tide a great deal of the shore must be exposed.  Going upon the slippery stones, beside which lay a few idle and rickety boats, I found the expected range of windows with “red curtains matching the noses of the regular customers.”  I looked in at the door.  A long passage opened a vista of pleasant bar-parlor, or whatever it may have been, on the river-side; and, perhaps, I should have seen Miss Abbey Potterson if I had gone to the end.  Several water-side characters were drinking beer at the lead-covered counter, waited upon by a sharp young woman, who seems to have replaced Bob Gliddery.  Instead of the little room called “Cozy,” where the Police Inspector drank burned sherry with Lightwood and Wrayburn, there was an apartment labelled “The Club.”  A party of “regular customers,” all evidently connected with water (or mud), sat around a table:  beyond question they were Tootle, and Mullins, and Bob Glamour, and Captain Joey; and at ten o’clock Miss Abbey would issue from the bar-parlor, and send them home.  If The Jolly Fellowship Porters is still extant, this must be it.

Whitehall [Footnote:  From “Walks in London.”]

BY AUGUSTUS J.C.  HARE

The present Banqueting-House of Whitehall was begun by Inigo Jones, and completed in 1622, forming only the central portion of one wing in his immense design for a new palace, which, if completed, would have been the finest in the world.  The masonry is by a master-mason, Nicholas Stone, several of whose works we have seen in other parts of London.  “Little did James think that he was raising a pile from which his son was to step from the throne to a scaffold.”  The plan of Inigo Jones would have covered 24 acres, and one may best judge of its intended size by comparison with other buildings.  Hampton Court covers 8 acres; St. James’s Palace, 4 acres; Buckingham Palace, 2-1/2 acres.  It would have been as large as Versailles, and larger than the Louvre.  Inigo Jones received only 8s. 4d. a day while he was employed at Whitehall, and L46 per annum for house-rent.  The huge palace always remained unfinished.

Whitehall attained its greatest splendor in the reign of Charles I. The mask of Comus was one of the plays acted here before the king; but Charles was so afraid of the pictures in the Banqueting-House being injured by the number of wax lights which were used, that he built for the purpose a boarded room called the “King’s Masking-House,” afterward destroyed by the Parliament.  The gallery toward Privy Garden was used for the king’s collection of pictures, afterward either sold or burned.  The Banqueting-House was the scene of hospitalities almost boundless.