purl, and for gentlemen Burton ale. Tyers's
venture had a great run of success, though this
was the original despondent man who said that,
if he had been a hatter, men would have been
born without heads. Within a few hours of his
death, he caused himself to be wheeled into the
gardens which had been his hobby, that he might
delight his eyes with what he saw. If he now
look on the old ground with spiritual eyes,
perhaps they find yet more delight in plantations
on its soil of which he never dreamed, and
running fountains of sweet water more refreshing
than any which ever plashed upon his basins
set in the smooth turf.

Supported in part by the establishment of
factories by the water-side and elsewhere—of
potteries, glassworks, gasworks, distilleries,
foundries, engineering works, shot manufactories,
starch manufactories, soapboilers, candle-works,
and so forth—there had multiplied in Lambeth a
population of artisans and common labourers,
with petty traders ministering to their wants.
Then from the district of Saint Mary's there was
cut off a curacy, or sub-district of Saint
Mary-the-Less, with a church built in eighteen 'twenty-
eight, and a population of some sixteen thousand,
living almost without exception upon scanty
earnings. The Prince of Wales is lord of the
soil, as Duke of Lancaster. And any chance of
recovery to better life which this district might
have had, was ruined by the mere improvident
rapacity which characterised the management of
the estate when George the Fourth, first and
worst gentleman in Europe, was Prince of Wales.

The church of St. Mary-the-Less is in Prince's-road:
a road called Prince's in relation to the
royal style of the adjacent King's Town, or
Kennington, from the days when Charles the
First was Prince of Wales. That prince
occasionally occupied a manor-house built here on
the site of a palace in which Henry the Third
met his parliament, Edward the Third kept
Christmas, and Henry the Fifth sometimes lived.
The only palace now in Prince's-road, is
immediately opposite the church of St. Mary-the-Less:
the palace of Lambeth pauperism. A
very spacious palace it is; the workhouse of a
parish sixteen miles in circuit, stretching from
Thames bank to Streatham, containing a
population of some three hundred thousand, and,
moreover, a metropolitan borough that returns
two members to parliament. Until the death
of Doctor D'Oyley, its rector, twenty years ago,
Lambeth was one great undivided parish, with a
revenue to the rector of about two thousand five
hundred a year, being at the rate of five a
shilling a soul for care or neglect; but it was
then subdivided into the four district parishes
of St. Mary's, with the mother church close by
the archbishop's palace, St. George's, St. John's,
and St. Mark's, at Kennington.

The district of St. Mary-the-Less was given,
eleven years ago, into the charge of an energetic
working clergyman. The church windows and
walls had fallen into disrepair for want of
parishioners willing, or if willing, able, to maintain
the building properly. There was no
provision for the livelihood of an incumbent. The
new comer's clear income, as clergyman for the
district, was, in the first year, something like
fifty pounds, and in the second year five or six
pounds less than nothing. For, much even of
the necessary cost of cleansing, heating, and
lighting the church, and its other incidental
expenses, through the poverty of its congregation,
fell upon him. There are but a few dozen people
in the district who pay any income tax at all.

After three years of work much had been
done, but there were not more than twenty
persons resident in the district who contributed
towards the local charities, and only
two owners of the property within the district
were among his helpers. The almost universal
poverty of the people multiplied their needs of
money, while making it impossible to raise it
from among themselves. Nevertheless, on went
the worker and the work. The district
presently was subdivided, and a Peel's Parish, of
St. Peter's, Vauxhall, was formed, with charge
over a population of about six out of the
sixteen thousand. Here one of the two curates,
who had helped in the duty of St. Mary-the-Less,
became incumbent, with a good parsonage-house
provided for him, the house being the old
manager's dwelling-house attached to, and upon
the ground of, the late Vauxhall Gardens. He
is, in fact, the present manager of the old
grounds with their new lights ahd properties.
Among the new and attractive properties are
new National Schools, perfectly appointed;
buildings for the Lambeth School of Art; a poor
man's club and dining-room; rooms for a needlework
society, which, with a share allowed it of
the government work in making clothes for the
army, now saves many a poor woman from utter
distress. Besides all this, there is in the same
group of buildings an orphanage, in which
daughters of clergymen and professional men are
housed while in training for the not thankless
or ignoble work of carrying out the right will
of the nation as its teachers of the children of the
poor. Besides all this, again, there is in the same
group of buildings a church, the church of St.
Peter's, Vauxhall, built at a cost of eight thousand
five hundred pounds, which, with its
groined roof filled in with solid brick, is
probably the best brick church in London. Some
four thousand pounds more are wanted for its
tower, which has yet to be built, but the church
itself is finished, and in daily use.

The marvel to us, and to every one, must be,
how all this could have been done by the incumbent
of a benefice endowed with less than a
hundred pounds a year, and in a district that
did not contain above twenty people able to
help in the work with money, beyond pence
and small silver at collections. The chief part
of the work was all accomplished before the
incumbent of St. Mary-the-Less profited by the
new ecclesiastical arrangement for bringing the
income of certain livings up to the level of
three hundred a year. The local charitable
societies that help the poor to keep body and
soul together in the winter-time, have, indeed,