"There is a pale heap of books in the corner of my pew, and while the organ, which is hoarse and sleepy, plays in such fashion that I can hear more of the rusty working of the stops than of any music, I look at the books, which are mostly bound in faded baize and stuff. They belonged, in 1754, to the Dowgate family; and who were they? Jane Comport must have married Young Dowgate, and come into the family that way; Young Dowgate was courting Jane Comport when he gave her her prayer-book, and recorded the presentation on the fly-leaf. If Jane were fond of Young Dowgate, why did she die and leave the book here? Perhaps at the rickety altar, and before the damp commandments, she, Comport, had taken him, Dowgate, in a flush of youthful hope and joy, and perhaps it had not turned out in the long run as great a success as was expected. "The opening of the service recalls my wandering thoughts.... I find that I have been taking a kind of invisible snuff ... I wink, sneeze and cough ... snuff made of the decay of matting, wood, cloth, stone, iron, earth and something else ... the decay of dead citizens.... Dead citizens stick on the walls and lie pulverised on the sounding-board over the clergyman's head, and, when a gust of air comes, tumble down upon him." And, further, with regard to the surrounding bustle and merchandise in the busy streets: "In the churches about Mark Lane there was a dry whiff of wheat; and I accidentally struck an airy sample of barley out of an aged hassock in one of them. From Rood Lane to Tower Street, and thereabouts, there was often a subtle flavour of wine,--sometimes of tea. One church, near Mincing Lane, smelt like a druggist's drawer. Behind the Monument, the service had a flavour of damaged oranges, which, a little farther down towards the river, tempered into herrings, and gradually toned into a cosmopolitan blast of fish. In one church, the exact counterpart of the church in the _Rake's Progress_, where the hero is being married to the horrible old lady, there was no specialty of atmosphere, until the organ shook a perfume of hides all over us from some adjacent warehouse." (The church depicted in Hogarth's _Rake's Progress_ was, however, the older church of St. Marylebone, now rebuilt.)