"No one who has seen the crowds of ragged, dreary, pale-faced boys and girls rushing to the fields and flowers at Temple Gardens when the lawyers graciously open the gates to them and watched them pour out at evening through the Temple Gates into Fleet Street, leaping, laughing, and refreshed, could help thinking that it would be a gladsome sight to see such groups issue from the Lambeth Palace gates. I never thought when sending the memorial to the Archbishop that the fields should be divested from the see or sold away from it. I believed that the late Archbishop would, as the new Archbishop may, by an act of grace accord his little neighbours free admission, or at least exchange the dead walls for palisades, so that children playing around may vary the stones of the Embankment for a sight of sheep and grass through the bars. The late Canon Kingsley asked me to visit him when he came into residence at Westminster. My intention was to ask him and the late Dean, whom I had the honour to know, to judge themselves whether the matter now in question was not practicable, and then to speak to the Archbishop about it. But death carried them both away one after the other before this opportunity could occur. My belief remains unchanged that the late Archbishop would have done what is now asked had time and the state of his health permitted him to attend to the matter himself. It would have been but an extension of the unselfish and kindly uses to which he had long permitted the grounds to be put." From several letters I received at the time, I quote one dated Christmas Eve, 1882:-- "Honour and thanks to you, Mr. Holyoake, for your recent and former letters respecting Lambeth Palace field. Very much more good could be got out of it than as a place for cricketing on half-holidays and occasional school-treats, and for desolation at other times except as regards an approved few. "There is no recreation ground in London that I look upon with so much satisfaction as a triangular inclosure of plain grass by Kennington Church, enjoyed commonly by the dirtiest and poorest children." But a letter of a very different character appeared in the Standard, December 20, 1882, entitled, "The Lambeth Palace Garden ":-- "Sir,--No right-minded person can fail to be deeply impressed by Mr. Holyoake's touching letter in your impression of to-day. Its sentiments are so very beautiful and its principles so exactly popular, and in such perfect accordance with the blessed Liberal maxim--'What is yours is mine and what is mine is my own,' that I myself am overcome with delight at their enunciation. The pleasure of being perfectly free and easy with other people's property, evidently becoming so sincere and abounding, and the simple manner in which such liberality can be now readily practised without any personal self-denial or inconvenience, makes the principle in action perfectly commendable, and one to be duly applied and most carefully expanded.