In Paternoster-Row I cruised about, and came to Amen Corner quite too soon for satisfaction. I strove also to understand the precise bounds of Little Britain, as I plodded therein, and bethought me of its right worshipful reputation for books and men of letters in olden times. In Cheapside, I could see nothing but John Gilpin and his family, till I came to Bow Church, and, by good luck, heard a full peal of the very bells that make cockneys, and that whilom made poor Whittington o’ the Cat a Lord Mayor. What they were ringing for did not appear, as the Church was shut. So I fared on through the Poultry and Corn-hill, paying due deference to the Royal Exchange, till on a sudden, by some odd crooks and twistings through the very ventricles of this heart of the Metropolis, I came before the Tower. It gave me a thrill of emotion to see it before me: and ‘here is Tower-Hill,’ said I—‘here stood the scaffold—and I am sure these walls must have been the last things seen, before they closed their eyes forever, by Strafford, and by Laud, and by so many before and after.’ And these the towers of Caesar, and their history the history of England almost ever since his conquest! The Church of All-Hallows, Barking, happened to stand open, much to my satisfaction, as I was threading a very narrow and old-fashioned street near the Tower; and I entered, with a thrill of emotion, to behold the venerable interior, where the service for the burial of the dead was read over the bleeding corpse of Archbishop Laud, as it was brought in just after the axe had made him a martyr, and here temporarily interred. I remembered that Southey remarks that the Prayer-Book itself seemed to share in his funeral, for on the same day, the Parliament made it a crime to use it in any solemnity whatever: and I endeavored to recall the scene of desolation which must then have smitten to the heart any true son of the Church of England who was its spectator, beholding, as he did, the Primate of all England going down into the sepulchre, as the last, apparently, of his dignity and order; the Church herself beheaded, if not destroyed, with him; and the Prayer-Book reading its own burial! Thank God, there I stood, two hundred years later, a living witness of the resurrection of that Church and its ritual, and of its powerful life, in the new world of the West. I trust I did not offer a vain thanksgiving upon the spot. I then looked at the old tombs and brasses, which are interesting, if not fine. Here kneel a worshipful old knight and his dame, with their nine or ten children, demurely cut in alabaster, upon the common tomb of the parents; and there is a brass, said to be Flemish, commemorating another pair, who were laid to rest the same year that saw Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More beheaded and interred in this same Church. Here, too, is some fine carving; and some of the pews have curious adornings, in token of their being the place