being one mass of costly marble, fresco paintings, pictures wrought in encaustic tiles of delicate hues, and painted windows. The defect, however, is the excessive darkness--“inspissated gloom,” Dr. Johnson would call it. Nothing in mediæval work can exceed the magnificence of the reredos and the wall that rises above it, disposed in arches and tiers, and set off with painted figures and mosaics. The workmanship everywhere cannot be surpassed--iron work, gilding, carvings, all are of the best. The beautiful lines of the lancet-shaped arches should be noted, with the sharp and delicate carvings of the capitals. Nothing, indeed, has been spared on this great and costly work. Many of the houses opposite are given up to pious works, and occupied by large communities of Sisters, who are seen at every hour flitting through the neighbouring streets. The churches erected by Roman Catholics display far more variety and architectural graces. The Catholic chapels of fifty years ago were chiefly foreign, sheltered by the various Embassies. Such was the little French chapel close to Baker Street; those in Spanish Place, near Manchester Square; the Bavarian in Warwick Street, and the Sardinian Chapel in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This latter building was sacked and burnt by the mob in the fury of the Gordon Riots. The same fate befel the still more modest chapel in Warwick Street, Golden Square. These Embassy chapels have still a foreign air in their interior arrangement, displaying a faded gaudiness and old-fashioned elaboration. Passing Warwick Street Chapel we may note its shabby exterior, suggesting some struggling conventicle; but this unobtrusiveness was designed purposely, in the hope of its not again attracting the notice of the “religious” mobs. Fifty years ago the place was in the highest vogue, for here the most eminent singers used to lend their voices to the services, and the late Mr. Braham flourished off, and made the old rafters ring again with his stentorian notes. Not far away, just out of Soho Square, is to be seen another grimed and neglected-looking edifice, a stretch of gloomy brickwork, with rows of windows, having the general air of a disused Assembly room. This, curious to say, was actually its original function. For, over a hundred and twenty years ago, it was the well-known “Mrs. Cornelys’,” where her masquerades and ridottos, the most brilliant in London, were held. Mrs. Cornelys, after being patronized by all “the nobility and gentry,” came at last to “selling asses’ milk” in the suburbs, and died in a wretched way. Her “rooms” after some vicissitudes were “converted” into a chapel.[24]