THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE, AND HISTORICAL CHRONICLE. FROM JULY TO DECEMBER, 1831. VOLUME CI. (BEING THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF A NEW SERIES.) PART THE SECOND. PRODESSE & DELECTARE. E PLURIBUS UNUM. By SYLVANUS URBAN, Gent. London: PRINTED BY J. B. NICHOLS AND SON, 25, PARLIAMENT STREET; AND SOLD BY JOHN HARRIS, AT THE CORNER OF ST. PAUL'S CHURCH YARD, Ludgate strEET; BY G. G. BENNIS, 55 RUE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS *Royal Pavilion erected for the ceremony of opening London Bridge. .127 Portrait of the Rev. John Gutch, M.A. F.S.A..... View of the Nave in Westminster Abbey with the Coronation Procession...224 PREFACE. A PREFACE is to a book what the gateway is to an inn; either it invites the traveller by its appearance to turn in and recreate himself, or else it causes him to pass on with disgust. But, in the present instance, long-established reputation sets us free from any painful anxiety on this point. We cannot better commence our Address, than by thanking our Correspondents for their interesting communications, which we sincerely do, trusting that we shall never fail to deserve their valuable attentions. We have no fear of being prosecuted for bribery before a Parnassian committee, when we tell them that it is our honourable distinction, to have concentrated information from such various quarters. The plan of our Miscellany enables every inquirer to communicate his researches to the world; and thus the earliest intelligence is conveyed, queries are answered, truth is elicited, and each Number becomes a circulating medium of historical, archæological, and literary information. We own, however, that we gladly look forward to the close of a Volume, when we can meet our Readers on new ground. In a Preface we can express our opinions freely, without being called upon to decide between controversialists, or to pronounce on the admission or painful rejection of kind communications. So much of our Magazine is devoted to the past, that it is only on this occasion we can turn our faces round, and survey what is actually present before us. Yet on the whole, we feel how happy an exemption this retrospective character gives us from the bustle of the day. The sanguine anticipations of the advocates of the Reform Bill can find no echo in our voice; neither, on the other hand, are we concerned to show that, in Politics, whatever is, is right.' Our task is to retrieve the perishing, to decypher the fading, to discover the hidden, and to cast the light of our torch over those ages and scenes which would else be covered with darkness. In one respect, we ought to greet the Reform Bill; for by extinguishing rotten boroughs, annihilating charters, and changing the nature of tenures, it will render all these things matter for archæology, convert the present into the past, and furnish us with additional topics. In our volume for Nineteen Hundred and Thirty-one, we may probably give a list of disfranchised places, which have not returned Members to Parliament within the memory of man. The subject of antiquities naturally tends to T |