So I passed on to Lambeth, and came by Bishop’s Walk, under the walls of the Archbishop’s gardens, to Morning Prayer at St. Mary’s. It was here, under the shadow of this Church, that the poor Queen of James, the Runagate, stood shivering on a stormy night, with her unfortunate little babe packed up in a basket, awaiting a start to France. Had the baby only cried, how different might have been the history of the British Crown and nation! A great many Scotchmen would have lived quietly through the greater part of the succeeding century, who (as the baby slept soundly) were only born to be hanged, shot, and beheaded; and then, in all probability, we should have had no Waverley novels! However, I now found the Church a ruin; only its tower standing, and a bit of the chancel, while the rebuilding was going bravely on. But I am glad to say that the daily service was not therefore interrupted. The chancel was roughly boarded up, and protected from the weather, and there a good congregation was at prayer when I entered, two curates officiating. I was rejoiced to worship there, in such a primitive way. The bones of the brave old primate Bancroft, and of good Archbishop Tenison were beneath us as we knelt; and the meek Secker reposes hard by. After breakfast, at the Rectory, in a room overlooking the archiepiscopal grounds, I went to the river, and hunted up one of those deposed and antiquated things—a _wherry_, resolved to go by water, in the old fashioned way, from Lambeth to the Temple. Now, then, I was legitimately afloat upon “the silent highway,” only that the hideous little steamers would destroy my anti-modern imaginations, as they paddled triumphantly by. I was trying to imagine myself in the primate’s barge, with Cranmer or with Laud; or again, as I “shot the bridge, with its roar of waters,” I conjured up the day when Dryden, with his fashionable companions, took water, that they might the better hear the distant guns, by which they knew “the fleet, under his Royal Highness, was then engaging the Dutch upon the coast, and that a great event was then deciding.” Ah! it was the poetry of the Thames to go upon it with oars, and to hear the waterman lament the degenerate days of steam; or to draw out his _Allegro_ by questions about the “champion of the river,” and the great rowing match soon to come off, to the probable discomfiture of that hero’s further claims to that dignity. The salt talked very bad _dry_ English, but his _wet_ vocabulary was truly rich; and I left his boat at Blackfriars Bridge, with a sort of feeling that, instead of a few paltry shillings he had earned by his conduct on the voyage, the not unusual compliment to affable sea-captains, of “a vote of thanks, and a piece of plate.”