At thirty-four years of age Otway died, choked, it is said, by a roll which he too hastily swallowed after a long fast. The unfortunate poet, almost naked, starving, and fearfully harassed by creditors, was given a guinea by a friendly gentleman in a coffee-house where he had asked for a shilling. Out of this guinea he purchased the piece of bread which caused his death. Another account declares that Otway, desirous of avenging the death of a friend who had been shot in the street, pursued the assassin as far as Dover on foot, which brought on a fever from which he died in the “Bull Inn” on Tower Hill. Pope corroborates this version of Otway’s death, but says his friend had been merely robbed and not murdered. A brass affixed to the wall of Trotton church within comparatively recent years commemorates the memory of the unfortunate young man, but Otway himself lies in a vault under the church of St. Clement Danes. Trotton church is an interesting old building, which contains a tomb of great archæological interest—the sarcophagus of Sir John Camoys and the Lady Elizabeth, his wife. This church has, like many village churches, suffered more or less from the restorations to which it has been subjected. One alteration which particularly annoyed me was the removal of an old door which bore the mark of many a Cromwellian bullet upon its exterior side. Within the last few years, however, some attempt has been made to repair the ravages of the restorer—the old wooden altar-rails having been replaced in their original position, whilst certain very curious mural paintings have been once more exposed to view. In the ’sixties and ’seventies the fiend of restoration may be said to have stalked rampant through the land, and rectors vied with one another in renovating and vulgarising the sacred edifices committed to their charge. At a Sussex church in a village quite close to where we lived, great indignation was, I remember, aroused by workshops being erected all over the churchyard, in which workmen fashioned modern Gothic pinnacles and other architectural gewgaws wherewith to decorate the stately old church. Tombstones were temporarily taken up, no particular attention being paid to their exact position, and in consequence no one felt at all certain that they were ever replaced in their old position—the tombstone of “John Smith” being in many cases placed over the grave of “Thomas Brown,” and _vice versa_, a proceeding not entirely satisfactory to their families, some of whom were very annoyed. The rector, however, who was delighted at his vulgarised church, thought little of such a trifle as this, and organised an ornate service of reopening at which his parishioners somewhat ruefully returned thanks for the blessings of the restoration.