Such people would naturally imagine that the mighty and interminable procession which moved through its street night and day, with its confused roar of shouts and cries, its neighings and bellowing and bleatings and its muffled thunder-tramp, was the one great thing in this world, and themselves somehow the proprietors of it.

And so they were, in effect--at least they could exhibit it from their windows, and did--for a consideration--whenever a returning king or hero gave it a fleeting splendour, for there was no place like it for affording a long, straight, uninterrupted view of marching columns.
Men born and reared upon the Bridge found life unendurably dull and inane elsewhere.

History tells of one of these who left the Bridge at the age of seventy-one and retired to the country.

But he could only fret and toss in his bed; he could not go to sleep, the deep stillness was so painful, so awful, so oppressive.

When he was worn out with it, at last, he fled back to his old home, a lean and haggard spectre, and fell peacefully to rest and pleasant dreams under the lulling music of the lashing waters and the boom and crash and thunder of London Bridge.
In the times of which we are writing, the Bridge furnished 'object lessons' in English history for its children--namely, the livid and decaying heads of renowned men impaled upon iron spikes atop of its gateways.