Most of those bards were intimately associated with London, and several of them are buried in the Abbey. It is, indeed, because so many storied names are written upon gravestones that the explorer of the old churches of London finds so rich a harvest of impressive association and lofty thought. Few persons visit them, and you are likely to find yourself comparatively alone in rambles of this kind. I went one morning into St. Martin--once "in the fields," now in one of the busiest thoroughfares at the centre of the city--and found there only a pew-opener preparing for the service, and an organist playing an anthem. It is a beautiful structure, with its graceful spire and its columns of weather-beaten stone, curiously stained in gray and sooty black, and it is almost as famous for theatrical names as St. Paul's, Covent Garden, or St. George's, Bloomsbury, or St. Clement Danes. Here, in a vault beneath the church, was buried the bewitching and affectionate Nell Gwyn; here is the grave of James Smith, joint author with his brother Horace--who was buried at Tunbridge Wells--of _The Rejected Addresses;_ here rests Yates, the original Sir Oliver Surface; and here were laid the ashes of the romantic and sprightly Mrs. Centlivre, and of George Farquhar, whom neither youth, genius, patient labour, nor sterling achievement could save from a life of misfortune and an untimely and piteous death. A cheerier association of this church is with Thomas Moore, the poet of Ireland, who was here married. Illustration: "Gray's Inn Square." At St. Giles-in-the-Fields, again, are the graves of George Chapman, who translated Homer, Andrew Marvel, who wrote such lovely lyrics of love, Rich, the manager, who brought out Gay's _Beggar's Opera_, and James Shirley, the fine old dramatist and poet, whose immortal couplet has been so often murmured in such solemn haunts as these-- "Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in the dust." Shirley lived in Gray's Inn when he was writing his plays, and he was fortunate in the favour of queen Henrietta Maria, wife to Charles the First; but when the Puritan times arrived he fell into misfortune and poverty and became a school-teacher in Whitefriars. In 1666 he was living in or near Fleet Street, and his home was one of the many dwellings that were destroyed in the great fire. Then he fled, with his wife, into the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, where, overcome with grief and terror, they both died, within twenty-four hours of each other, and were buried in the same grave. Illustration: "Shield with Gargoyle Head" CHAPTER XVI A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN