of bistre and sienna, giving the delicately tinted
prospect a massive framing. As for the trees
and the grass in the old churchyard— they thrive
wondrously for London vegetation, and gather
no smoke— they can scarcely be said to be green
at early morn. The leaves and herbage seem
chameleon-hued. You shall find maize and
primrose in their lights, blue and purple in their
shadows. Laminæ of silver, play on blades
and veins, and, upon my word, I think that on
summer nights the Dew falls here— the only dew
that is shed in all London, beyond the tears of
the homeless.

Such is the Precinct at early morning, and
before Lucifer has rung for his shaving-water,
and with his cloven foot stamped on the floor to
wake his down-stairs neighbour Mammon. The
Board of Health have long since sealed the
churchyard; but that God's Acre looks, with its
white and grey tombstones, so peaceful and so
tranquil, that I should not wonder at the sternest
opponent of intramural interments leaving
directions in his will that application should be
made for permission for his dust to be
mingled with that of the forefathers of this
secluded hamlet. I have incited several artistic
friends to bring down easels and drawing-boards,
and limn me a picture, or at least a
sketch, of St. Mary-le-Chou and the surrounding
Precinct; but I am convinced, now, that
the only European painter capable of
transferring the scene to canvas is Mr. Millais. I
am grieved to add, by way of caution, that
from any pictorial representations of the
Precinct should be excluded sundry high-looming
placards bearing inscriptions that relate to
Pickles and Sauces, to Pale Ale, and to Durham
coals, placards which in their commercial
commonplace mar the fair prospect. Again, let me
remark that, true to my usual habit of looking at
the outside of things, I have never yet visited
the interior of the church. I hear there are a
nobly carved roof-tree, a rare window, and some
curious monuments. A mystic-looking old woman
potters about the iron gate and the flagged avenue
that leads to the principal door. I see her on
week days, mostly, and from the battered state of
her bonnet and sundry manifestations of brooms
and scrubbing-brushes pervading her outward
woman, I conjecture her to be the charwoman-
housekeeper of the church. I positively saw her
sweeping out the churchyard one day, which
me a pleasant notion of her tidiness. The
duties of the incumbent (whom everybody seems
to like) must be easy. He knows all the
parishioners, and they know him, and the coalies,
who are the fortissimi of the Precinct, touch their
sou' westers to him as he glides about. There
are never any disputes about church-rates that I
know of here,— how should there be? Royalty,
I presume, takes care of its own property—
and the poor-rates amount to about half a
farthing in the pound once in every quarter of a
century. The Precinctians go to church with
great regularity, but the odium theologicum
does not thrive here, and the clergyman has
not yet decorated his fabric with bouquets of
cut carrots and turnips from Covent Garden
market. A decent spirit of toleration reigns;
and farther down towards the water there is a
quaint little Lutheran High Dutch chapel, also
possessing its tiny paddock of a churchyard, and
watched over by a stout sexton of great gravity
of countenance and sobriety of conversation.
With two cemeteries within its limits the
Precinct might not unreasonably be suspected to be
given to ghosts when the moon is up; but then
the inhabitants are all so cheerful, and the
younger portion are so much addicted to
sweethearting by the churchyard rails, that the ghosts
wouldn't have a chance, and I suppose have cast
themselves in disgust into the Thames, and
become Pixies, ferriers, and Undines.

I hope it is not irreverent on my part to
observe that the long cool walks by the churchyard
walls have been, and are still, made to
serve the interests of the British Drama. I don't
mean that the walls are placarded with play-bills,
or woodcut broadsheets; on the contrary,
both beggars and bill-stickers seem banished
from the Precinct by a stern though tacit
ostracism; but in my early days of Precinctism I
used frequently, on week days, to discern sundry
clean-shaven, dark-eyed gentlemen, very shiny
as to their hats, very spruce and natty as to
their attire, who stalked gravely up and down the
shady walks, holding small printed books in their
hands, which they perused with great earnestness.
Their eyes were often upturned, and rolled
somewhat, and they occasionally muttered to
themselves. Alarmed for the interests of the Church
of England and the Protestant Succession, I
was at first inclined to surmise that these mysterious
persons were hierophants of the Romish
persuasion, Oratorians, Jesuits of the short robe,
or something of that kind, and that they came
hither to read their breviaries as an insidious
means of displaying their superior sanctity, and
of perverting the peaceful Protestants of the
Precinct, Popewards. But when as it fell upon a
day, brushing the skirts of one of the gentlemen
with the shiny hats and the natty garments, and
hearing him declaim something about
cloud-capped towers and gorgeous pinnacles, and
chancing a few days afterwards to meet another
shiny and natty student quietly puffing at a
snowy pipe, and imbibing cold sherry-and-water
in the parlour of the Palace, I made inquiries;
I gained information; and I arrived at
a more reasonable conclusion. I discovered
that these studious gentlemen were actors who
came to the Precinct, as an eminently quiet
place, to study their parts. This accounted for
the cloud-capped towers and the gorgeous
pinnacles, the shiny hats and the natty coats.

There was a horse, too, that puzzled me sorely
ere I graduated in these Precinct mysteries. A
brown, ill-groomed, somewhat weak-kneed and
wall-eyed quadruped he was; his saddle not
handsome, his bridle not bright, but he with a
rounded white nose indicating much meekness and
docility of character. Every afternoon, till about
seven P.M., I used to see him placidly standing
in the Precinct, riderless, and tethered to the