That there was once a palace in the Precinct
is indubitable. I think that the last personages
of importance who occupied it were some
ambassadors from the seignory of Venice. I know
that in the first decade of the present century
the few ruinous walls of the palace that
remained, enclosed a kind of enlarged black-hole
for deserters and drunken culprits from the
Guards, and also an unsavoury Pound or
Barracoon, or depôt for recruits. This dismal place
was swept away, at about the period of the erection
of Waterloo-bridge, and tall brick warehouses
were erected on its site. But the Precinct had
another more powerful and renowned palatial
neighbour. Hard by, to the eastward, although
Wellington-street and Lancaster-buildings now
stretch between, is the royal property of Proudfoot
House. To the moderns it is but a grey,
stately mansion surrounding a quadrangle, with
an allegory of Father Thames quite dry and
looking into a bear-pit in the midst, the whole
built by the Anglo-Swede Sir William Chambers;
the apartments towards the Strand once
giving lodging room to Royal Academicians and
Fellows of the Royal Society, but now entirely
occupied (with its handsome newly-built wing)
by government offices. Few of the spruce clerks,
the red-faced messengers, the hot stampers and
weighers, the placid old gentlemen who sit in
easy-chairs with little to do beyond signing their
initials occasionally and drawing fifteen hundred
a year regularly— few of these snug civilians
know, or would probably care to know, that the
site of their quiet offices was once occupied by
an Inn of Chancery, by the palaces of the
bishops of Chester and Worcester, and by one, if
not two churches; and that the parishioners of
St. Mary-le-Strand cried out " Sacrilege!" when
the temples were razed to build the haughty
duke's house. So it was, however, but as I
design, some day, to say a few words concerning
Proudfoot House, I will dismiss it now with the
bare mention that until the middle of the last
century the Precinct— my Precinct— shared with
it the curious casualty, not uncommon in royal
properties, of an invasion of " squatters." Many
old and ruinous houses had been crept into and
squatted down in by Bohemian men, and waifs and
strays of town life. By degrees, finding themselves,
through indifference, undisturbed, they began to
let the tenements out to lodgers, called themselves
landlords, and exacted rent forsooth, but
the lodgers were quite as Bohemian and as
cunning in their generation as they; and one of the
notable humours of the Precinct a century since
was, on the part of the lodgers, to take advantage
of the pseudo-landlord's temporary absence
to lock him out of the tenement he had squatted
in, and, repudiating rent, to defy him from the
window to produce a better title than possession,
on his return. Thus the tenure in the Precinct
was a mixture of Gavelkind, Borough English,
Club law, frankalmoigne, aubaine or escheat,
and simple burglary. This jocose simplification
of conveyancing told immensely; but at last the
government, growing weary of the joke, issued
a writ of ejectment, called in the posse comitatus
and a squad of the Foot Guards to turn all these
unprofitable feudatories out, pulled down the
tenements, rebuilt them, and let them to
respectable tenants on favourable leases. But for
this revolution, the houses in the Precinct would
all be as old as a street in Chester, and probably
as disorderly as Baldwin's-gardens.

The whole of the Precinct is to be perambulated
— the church excepted— in about four
minutes and a half; but if you wish to note its
daily life, and watch its gaieties and gravities,
you must choose summer-time, a fine morning,
afternoon, or evening, and select as a point of
espial the open window of the Palace up-stairs
parlour. To think of the things that I have
seen from thence! The church and churchyard
are in themselves most edifying spectacles. If
you would view the outside of St. Mary-le-Chou
aright, look upon it at early morning, ere
the working smoke has poisoned and obscured
the air, ere that hot, damp, dusty day-cloud has
arisen, man's stature high, the cloud that to me is
always rife in London streets, and whose presence
I ascribe to the perpetual trampling of men's
feet, and their thick-panting respiration, seeking
gold or glory. At early morn there is not a
quoin in the old church's wall, not a mullion in
its blinking windows, not a cartouch or a
cantaliver, but stands forth sharp and clear in its
proper light, shade, and reflexion, as in a Venetian
photograph. You shall see the rugosities
of the stone as through an opera-glass; you
shall count the strands in the cordage of the
rigging of the great hayboats far away beyond at
Hungerford. This early morning beautifies and
enriches everything. As Sydney Smith used to
bid his little servant-maid draw up the window-blinds
on a sunshiny morning, and " glorify the
room," so does the summer sun glorify the hoar
old Precinct, and render lovely the ugly modern
"improvements" in bricks and boarding. Even
the sullen wreaths of smoke that will rise— all
Smoke-prevention Acts notwithstanding— and
accumulate in wreaths and ridges from kilns and
furnaces never quenched, in far-off Bermondsey
or remote South Lambeth; even this
indomitable murk turns golden and cream-coloured
when Aurora touches it with her finger-tips.
As for the brazen ship-weathercock above St.
Mary-le-Chou, it glows now golden bright, now
apple-green, now delicate rose, now many-hued
and mackerel-backed, like the auriferous dome
of Izaak's Church in Petersburg. Away, the
clock-tower of Westminster Palace rises, not
like a kitchen clock— the guise it wears when you
survey it from Bridge-street— but pale pink,
shaded and fretted blue, and glittering with
golden shafts. At early morn you can discern
the dots that mark the minutes, from numeral
to numeral, on the dial. Nearer to us one of
the gaunt pagodas of Hungerford-bridge is as
graceful as a campanile; in the extreme
distance ugly wharfs and boat-builders' sheds
harmonise and blend into delightful airiness;
and in the foreground the tall brick warehouses
and simple dwelling-houses, with their white
door-steps and green blinds, have rich shadows