I made what amends I could for my slight of the Mortons in the Temple
Church, by crossing presently to Clifford's Inn, Strand, where the
very founder of Merrymount, the redoubtable Thomas Morton himself was
sometime student of the law and a dweller in these precincts. It is now
the hall of the Art Workers' Guild, and anywhere but in London would
be incredibly quiet and quaint in that noisy, commonplace, modern
neighborhood. It in nowise remembers the disreputable and roistering
antipuritan, who set up his May-pole at Wollaston, and danced about it
with his debauched aboriginies, in defiance of the saints, till Miles
Standish marched up from Plymouth and made an end of such ungodly doings
at the muzzles of his matchlocks.
[Illustration: CLIFFORD'S INN HALL.]
It must have been another day that we went to view the church of St.
Botolph without Aldersgate, because some of the patrician families
emigrating to Massachusetts were from that parish, which was the home
of many patrician families of the Commonwealth. In St. Andrew's Holborn,
the Vanes, father and son, worshipped, together with the kindred of many
that had gone to dwell beyond seas. It is a large impressive interior,
after the manner of Wren, and at the moment of our visit was smelling of
varnish; most London churches smell of mortar, when in course of
their pretty constant reparation, and this was at least a change.
St. Stephen's Coleman-Street, may draw the Connecticut exile, as the
spiritual home of that Reverend Mr. Davenport, who was the founder of
New Haven, but it will attract the unlocalized lover of liberty because
it was also the parish church of the Five Members of Parliament whom
Charles I. tried to arrest when he began looking for trouble. It had a
certain sentiment of low-churchness, being very plain without and within
not unlike an Orthodox church in some old-fashioned New England town.
One entered to it by a very neatly-paved, clean court, out of a business
neighborhood, jostled by commercial figures in sack-coats and top-hats
who were expressive in their way of a non-conformity in sympathy with
the past if not with the present of St. Andrew's.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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