I am the more anxious about this because my friend, the genealogist,
here differed with the great Cunningham, and was leading me by that
morsel of Roman London to St. Peter's Lane, where he said Fox died, and
not to White Hart Court, where my other authority declares that he made
an end two days after preaching in the Friends' Meeting-house there. The
ignorant disciple of both may have his choice; perhaps in the process
of time the two places may have become one and the same. At any rate
we were able that morning to repair our error concerning St. Catherine
Cree's, which we had unwittingly seen before, and now consciously saw,
for Sir Nicholas Throgmorton's sake. It had the look of very high church
in the service which was celebrating, and I am afraid my mind was taken
less by the monument of Sir Nicholas than by the black-robed figure of
the young man who knelt with bowed head at the back of the church and
rapt me with the memory of the many sacerdotal shapes which I used to
see doing the like in Latin sanctuaries. It is one of the few advantages
of living long that all experiences become more or less contemporaneous,
and that at certain moments you cannot be distinctly aware just when and
where you are.
There was little of this mystical question when our mission took us
to Whitechapel, for there was nothing there to suggest former times or
other places. I did, indeed, recall the thick-breathed sweltering Sunday
morning when I had visited the region in July; but it is all now so
absolutely and sordidly modern that one has no difficulty in believing
that it was altogether different when so many Southern and especially
Virginian emigrations began there. How many settlers in New Jersey, New
York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland also were recruited from it, I know
not; but the reader may have it at second-hand from me, as I had it at
firsthand from my genealogist, that some Virginian names of the first
quality originated in Whitechapel, which, in the colonizing times, was
a region of high respectability, and not for generations afterwards the
perlieu it became, and has now again somewhat ceased to be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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