I suppose there can be no two opinions about the slums cleared away under that Improvement Act; but they were very picturesque, if also very dirty and tumble-down: all nodding gables, cobblestoned roads, and winding ways. I sorrow, in the artistic way, for those slums, and in the literary way for a house swept away at the same time, sentimentally associated with John Ruskin. It was the inn kept by his maternal grandmother, and is referred to in "Præterita": "... Of my father's ancestors I know nothing, nor of my mother's more than that my maternal grandmother was the landlady of the 'Old King's Head' in Market Street, Croydon; and I wish she were alive again, and I could paint her Simone Memmi's 'King's Head' for a sign." And he adds: "Meantime my aunt had remained in Croydon and married a baker.... My aunt lived in the little house still standing--or which was so four months ago[7]--the fashionablest in Market Street, having actually two windows over the shop, in the second story" (_sic_). There are slums at Croydon even now, for Croydon is a highly civilised progressive place, and slums and slum populations are the exclusive products of civilisation and progress, and a very severe indictment of them. But they are new slums; those poverty-stricken districts created _ad hoc_, which seem more hopeless than the ancient purlieus, and appear to be as inevitable to and as inseparable from modern great towns as a hem to a handkerchief. The old quarter of Croydon began to fall into the slum condition at about the period of Croydon's first expansion, when the [Greek: ohi polloi] impinged too closely upon the archiepiscopal precincts, and their Graces, neglecting their obvious duty in the manner customary to Graces spiritual and temporal, retired to the congenial privacy of Addington. Here stands the magnificent parish church of Croydon; its noble tower of the Perpendicular period, its body of the same style, but a restoration, after the melancholy havoc caused by the great fire of 1867. It is one of the few really satisfactory works of Sir Gilbert Scott; successful because he was obliged to forget his own particular fads and to reproduce exactly what had been destroyed. Another marvellous replica is the elaborate monument of Archbishop Whitgift, copied exactly from pictures of that utterly destroyed in the fire. Archbishop Sheldon's monument, however, still remains in its mutilated condition, with a scarred and horrible face calculated to afflict the nervous and to be remembered in their dreams.