There was once an ancient church in Watling Street called St. Anthonie's or vulgarly, St. Antholin's. It must have been an interesting church. It was full in its later period of Presbyterian fire and fury. It was also full of epitaphs, one of which I cannot resist quoting. It covered the bones of Sir Thomas Knowles, Mayor of London about 1399: _Here lyeth graven under this stone Thomas Knowles, both flesh and bone, Grocer and alderman, years forty, Sheriff and twice mayor, truly; And for he should not lye alone, Here lyeth with him his good wife Joan. They were together sixty year, And nineteen children they had in feere._ Two hundred years after this remarkable epitaph, St. Antholin's became notorious as the head-quarters of the Puritan clergy. The bell used to ring at unearthly hours of the morning, and all the High Churchmen in Cheapside turned uneasily in their beds and perhaps politely gnashed their teeth. In 1599 a group of citizens founded a lectureship. They gave certain property in London which was to pay for a daily lecture in the pulpit of St. Antholin's. The church became famous as a lecture theatre. Lilly, the astrologer, used to go there. Scott makes Mike Lambourne refer to it in "Kenilworth." The great fire burned down the church but still the daily lecture went on; it was rebuilt and the lecture was continued in the new St. Antholin's; it was demolished in 1870, and the lecture was transferred to St. Mary Aldermary, where I heard it yesterday! The sermon ended. The congregation rose. The little old man in the frock coat, who I imagined was deep in sleep, sprang to his feet and boomed "Amen!" "I've been here twenty-five years," said a verger, "and most of the people you see here are regular attendants. That old man in a frock coat was here when I came." * * * In a solicitor's office in Cannon Street I picked up the strings of a romance that has been acted time and again in London. The property bought in 1599 went on increasing in value, the St. Antholin lecture increased from one a week to two a week. Still the property increased in value, and funds accumulated till it was necessary to have a sermon every day, except Saturday. "The conditions on which the lectures are to be delivered are all set down in the old deeds," said one of the solicitors who administers the lectureship. "The clergyman who preaches must be a rector in charge of 2,000 souls, must not live more than seven miles as the crow flies from the Mansion House, and must not have a stipend of over £300." Some of the clergy who took up this three hundred and twenty year old sermon and carried it on for a while now wear bishop's gaiters.