, so Shakespeare relates, was often at the in , and there was the wonderful meetings of poets—Beaumont, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare himself—… - Sidney Dark

... During the Renaissance Luther and Calvin played their great rôles, and it saw Loyola and the little understood . At the beginning, Columbus and Da Gama make their voyages, and its later years were made romantic by the hazardous adventures of and Drake. It was the age of the , an age of adventure, an age of criticism, an age of laughter, an age of reaction and rejection, of destruction and reconstruction, of glory for princes and of suffering for the common people.

Christianity is a revolutionary religion or it is nothing.

There is nothing in this wide world more romantic than a great river on the banks of which stands a great city, and of all the cities in Europe, London is luckiest in its river. The Seine at Paris, the Tiber at Rome, are insignificant compared to the wide sweep of the Thames at London.