to honour the brave and good, or to greet one another in the loving cup.  Unlike the coldly intellectual reformers and theorists of the present day, they did not consider the gaol and the workhouse as the only asylums for poverty.  They were men of feeling and kindly impulse, not of abstract principles.  They gave their cheerful alms to the mendicants, and spread a bounteous board for their neighbours.  Fools that they were!  How is it that they did not recognize the mendicant to be an impostor and a drone, or bethink them that the money with which they feasted their neighbour might have purchased a field?  It was because they were warm-hearted, warm-blooded men, and not mere calculating machines.  They were glorious creatures, with thews and sinews, and they made their country great and powerful among the nations of the world; but they never paused to denounce the cost of a dinner, or to grudge a flowing bowl to their kinsfolk and neighbours.  Besides, our Pharisees of reform conveniently forget that the copious banquets at which they turn up their envious eyes are mostly defrayed from private funds.  The sheriffs, for instance, derive no aid from public moneys; their own fortunes provide the means for handsomely entertaining friends and strangers, and for dispensing open-handed charity.  The Lord Mayor himself almost invariably draws upon his own resources to a large amount, in order to maintain the ancient reputation and actual present influence of the City of London.  Demolish Gog and Magog, put down the civic banquets, break up and melt down the weighty and many-linked chains of solid gold round the neck of my lord mayor and the sheriffs, strip off the aldermen’s gowns, make a bonfire of the gilded carriages, wring, if you will, the necks of both swans and cygnets.  It is all vanity and vexation.  Man is an intellectual animal:  he wants none of these gewgaws.  Alas!  Wisdom may cry aloud in the streets, but no one will heed her words if she speaks beyond his comprehension.  In theory, these Pecksniffs of retrenchment might possibly be correct if mankind had attained the same degree of marble indifference with themselves.  In the mean time, while we are honest and true, it is good to be merry and wise.

Passing lightly over the intervening reigns, we now arrive at that of James I., who granted three very valuable charters to the Corporation of London.  The first alludes to the immemorial right of the mayor and commonalty to the conservancy of the Thames, and to the metage of all coals, grain, salt, fruit, vegetables, and other merchandise sold by measure, delivered at the port of London.  Of the exact nature of these privileges and of their beneficial operation, so far as public interests are concerned, we shall have occasion to speak hereafter, merely premising in this place that they have been enjoyed “from time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.”  The second charter, after confirming former liberties, enlarges the limits of the civic jurisdiction and ordains that the mayor, recorder, and two aldermen, shall be justices of oyer and terminer.  The third one is simply an amplification of the preceding two, and clears up various doubts as to the weighing and measuring of coals:  both offices are granted or confirmed.