It would seem rather that the original use of these quaint figures was, as with those continental examples before noted, ecclesiastical. No one who has had the opportunity of comparing the designs of the English and the foreign mazes can fail to be struck with the great similarity between them; suggesting, at least, a common origin and purpose. And this suggestion is greatly strengthened when we notice that, although the English mazes are never (with one modern instance only excepted) within churches, as are the continental instances, yet they are almost invariably close to a church, or the ancient site of a church. The Alkborough and Wing mazes, for instance, are hard by the parish churches; and those at Sneinton, Winchester, and Boughton Green are beside spots once consecrated by chapels dedicated in honour of St. Anne, St. Catherine, and St. John. The most probable conjecture is that these were originally formed, and for long years were used, for purposes of devotion and penance. Doubtless in later times the children often trod those mazy ways in sport and emulation, which had been slowly measured countless times before in silent meditation or in penitential tears. A word or two may be added in conclusion on mazes of the more modern sort, formed for amusement rather than for use, as a curious feature in a scheme of landscape gardening. These _topiary_ mazes, as they are called, usually have their paths defined by walls of well-cut box, yew, or other suitable shrubs; and they differ from the turf mazes in that they are often made purposely puzzling and misleading. In the ecclesiastical maze, it is always the patience, not the ingenuity, which is tested; there is but one road to follow, and though that one wanders in and out with tantalizing curves and coils, yet it leads him who follows it unerringly to the centre. From Tudor times this form of decoration for a large garden has been more or less popular. Burleigh formed one at the old palace at Theobald's, Hertfordshire, about 1560; and the Maze in Southwark, near a spot once occupied by the residence of Queen Mary before coming to the throne, and Maze Hill at Greenwich, no doubt mark the sites of labyrinths now otherwise forgotten. Lord Fauconbergh had a maze at Sutton Court in 1691; and William III. so highly approved of them that, having left one behind him at the Palace of the Loo, he had another constructed at Hampton Court. Literature and art have not disdained to interest themselves in this somewhat formal method of gardening; for in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries more than one treatise on their construction was published; while Holbein and Tintoretto have left behind them designs for topiary labyrinths.