church-yard under the Norman arch which has been for some years
gradually finding itself in an adjoining shop-wall. The whole church,
indeed, as now seen, is largely the effect (and it was one of the first
effects I saw) of that rescue of the past from the present which is
perpetually going on all over England. Till lately the Lady Chapel and
the crypt of St. Bartholomew had been used as an ironworker's shop; and
modern life still pressed close upon it in the houses looking on the
graves of the grassless church-yard. With women at the windows that
opened on its mouldy level, peeling potatoes, picking chickens, and
doing other household offices, the place was like something out of
Dickens, but something that yet had been cleaned up in sympathy with the
restoration of the church, going on bit by bit, stone by stone, arch by
arch, till the good monk Rahere (he was gay rather than good before he
turned monk) who founded the Cistercian monastery there in the twelfth
century would hardly have missed anything if he had returned to examine
the church. He would have had the advantage, which he could not have
enjoyed in his life-time, of his own effigy stretched upon his tomb, and
he might have been interested to note, as we did, that the painter
Hogarth had been baptized in his church six hundred years after his own
time. His satisfaction in the still prevalent Norman architecture might
have been less; it is possible he would have preferred the Gothic which
was coming in when he went out.

The interior was all beautifully sad and quiet, gray, dim, twilighted as
with the closes of the days of a thousand years; and in the pale ray an
artist sat sketching a stretch of the clerestory. I shall always feel a
loss in not having looked to see how he was making out, but the image of
the pew-opener remains compensatively with me. She was the first of her
sort to confront me in England with the question whether her very
intelligent comment was conscious knowledge, or mere parrotry. She was a