CHEAPSIDE AND THE CITY CHURCHES

Crowded pavements Sunday in the City A receded tide of worshippers Temples of Cheery Ease Two Weekday Congregations St. Stephen's, Walbrook Bishopsgate Churches The Westminster Abbey of the City Hounds ditch toy shops Postmen's Park Bunhill Fields The City Road Colebrooke Row and Charles Lamb London Pigeons The Guildhall The Lord Mayor in State The City and Literature.

WE are now in a part of London that really is too busy to wander in. London neither likes you to walk faster than itself nor slower; it likes you to adopt its own pace. In the heart of the city you cannot do this and see anything. To study Cheapside and its narrow tributaries, the very narrowness of which is eloquent of the past and at the same time so much a part of the present that it is used in a thoroughly British manner to imprison carts and carters for five or six hours a day, you must choose a Sunday ; but if you can loiter in these parts on a Sunday without becoming so depressed as to want to scream aloud, you are made of sterner stuff than I. For my part, I would rather be actually bruised by the jostlings of Cheapside on Monday than have solitary elbow room there on the day of rest, when the cheerful shops are shut and the dreary bells ring out. For the city on Sunday is to me a wilderness of melancholy. Church bells are tolerable only when one hears a single peal ; to hear many in rivalry is to suffer.

The city churches are many and are well cared for; but their day is over. During the week we are too busy making money, or not making it, to spare time for religion; while on Sunday we are elsewhere. I do not wish to suggest that there are not city men who value the opportunity which the open doors of the churches give them for a little escape from Mammon during the day; but for the most part the city church strikes one as obsolete. It belongs to the period when merchants not only made their money in the city but lived there too ; before Sydenham Hill and Brighton, Chislehurst and Weybridge were discovered. No one lives in. the city any longer, save the Lord Mayor and a few caretakers ; and all the gentlemen who would once have convoyed their wives and families up the aisles into the lethargic pews are now either doing the same thing in the suburbs or evading that duty on the golf links.

Times change: the city church remains, calm and self-possessed, offering sanctuary to any one who needs it ; but one cannot believe that were they all pulled down to-morrow any one would really resent it except a few simple-hearted old-fashioned city gentlemen and an aesthetic minority writing to the papers from Kensington, while the competition for the sites on which to erect commodious and convenient business premises would be instant and terrific. My own feelings about what ought to be done with them are mixed, for I believe that as sanctuaries they are precious and desirable but I see also that the revenue possible might be of the more practical use. Perhaps the best solution would be to keep the most beautiful and let the others go. Personally I rarely go into the city without spending a few minutes in one or other of these abodes of peace; but that is a circumstance of no value, because I go to the city only out of curiosity. I am not of it ; indeed, I am lost in it, and I can find myself again only by resting a while in one of these very formal havens. Silent they are not ; the roar of the city cannot be quite shut out ; but one hears it only as one hears in a shell the murmur of the sea.

Comfort ecclesiastical comfort is the note of the city church. It reflects the mind of the comfortable citizen for whom it was built, who liked things plain but good, and, though he did not want so far to misbehave as to think of religion as a cheerful topic, was still averse from Calvinistic gloom. (In St, Michael's on College Hill, for instance, is a notice over the door bearing the congenial promise to the congregation: "Plenteousness within His palaces.") St. Mary Woolnoth's, just by the Mansion House, is light, almost gay. The black woodwork and the coloured walls have a pleasant effect. The pulpit is an interesting example of the cabinetmaker's art. There is seating accommodation for very few persons, and that guards against overcrowding. The heating arrangements are good. St. Botolph's, in Aldgate, at the corner of Houndsditch, is another bright and cheery little church. This has a gallery and some elaborate plaster work on the ceiling. Comfort and well-being are strongly in evidence not to the point of decimating a golf links, of course, but comfort and well-being none the less.

One of the most unexpected of London churches is St. Stephen's, Walbrook (behind the Mansion House), into the side of which a bookshop has been built. Without, it is nothing uncommon and its spire is ordinary Wren; but within it is very imposing and rather fine, having a lofty dome and a number of stately pillars. I do not, however, agree with a London friend whose advice to me was to disregard all the city churches so long as I saw this one. At the opposite pole is St. Ethelburga's in Bishopsgate Street Within, a very modest shrinking little fane. Like All Hallows, Barking, St. Ethelburga's escaped the Fire, and it stands, a relic of Early English architecture, in the midst of the busiest part of the city. But beyond its isolation, age and simplicity, it has little to recommend it. The famous city church of St. Helen's is in Great St. Helen's Place, a little to the south, and it is worth visiting for the tombs alone for here lie London's greatest merchants, from Sir Thomas Gresham downwards : it is the Westminster Abbey of the city, the Valhalla of commerce. It has, however, one poet too; for the possibility that a William Shakespeare who lived in the parish in 1598 was the Swan of Avon led an American gentleman to erect a window to the dramatist.

In Leadenhall Street one may see where Lamb's India House stood; and Leadenhall Market, which fills several estuaries here, is interesting for its live-stock shops, where one may buy puppies and bantams, Persian cats and bullfinches, and even, I believe, foxes for the chase if one sinks so low. Cornhill has two churches almost touching each other St. Peter's and St. Michael's but neither is interesting, although St. Michael's tower can catch the sun very pleasantly.

For the most part the city church no longer has its graveyard; or if it has, the graves have been levelled and a little green space for luncheon-hour recreation bas been made instead. One of the pleasantest of these is that of St. Botolph Without, Aldersgate, which is known as Postmen's Park. It is here that the late G. F. Watts, the great painter, erected memorials to certain lowly heroes and heroines not in either of the heroic services, who saved Londoners' lives and perished in the effort. If any one has a strong taste for graveyards he should certainly visit Bunhill Fields at Finsbury if only to lose it. A crazy dirty place is this, with its myriad stories saturated with London soot and all awry, and the hum of factories on the northern side. Defoe's tomb is here, with an obelisk over it, and here also lie Bunyan and Isaac Watts, and William Blake and Thomas Stothard, two gentle old men who were rivals only in their painting of Chaucer's Pilgrims ; but one comes out in the depths of depression and had better perhaps not have, entered. Opposite is a little museum of relics of John Wesley, whose statue is there too. Another great spiritual man, George Fox, lies close by, in the Friends' burial ground.

From Bunhill Fields one may climb the City Road on a tram the City Road, once important, once having its place in the most popular comic song of the day, but now a kind of wilderness. The Eagle is now an ordinary public-house, the Grecian's Corinthian period is over; and when I was here last, that most dismal sight, the demolition of a church, was to be seen. But the City Road is worth traversing if only for Colebrooke Row, at the end of which, in the last house on the north side, adjoining Duncan Terrace and next a ginger-beer factory, Charles Lamb once lived, in the days before the New River was covered over; and it was down Lamb's front garden that George Dyer walked when he fell into that stream.