monastery of Marmoutier, near the episcopal city,
sometime early in the fourth century— what
has that saint and confessor, who was the first
deified demigod of the Romish Church, to do
with the modern haunt of tailors, jewellers,
biscuit-bakers, who know nothing about him,
never think of him, and do not know even that
their own schoolboy exclamation of "Betty
Martin" is only a corruption of one of the old
prayers addressed to the benevolent saint who
divided his cloak in two with his sword and gave
half to a beggar (a sure proof the cloak was no
mackintosh, because half of that is no use)? It
must have been a rude, wild age that thought
much of the deed of the French bishop. If old
Johnson had lived in those times, and been
seen carrying the poor dying street-walker up
the greasy staircase leading to his chambers, he
would have been sainted at once, and literary
men would now have a St. Johnson to pray to
for second editions. But let us quietly drop
down the well-shaft of a dozen centuries or
so, to the quiet time when the place was
mere extramural turf, pasturing quiet,
unambitious generations of flowers, long families of
white-starred daisies with the clearest possible
descent from the seeds that Adam brought
from Paradise. Every now and then to be
spurned out, perhaps, by the broad hoofs of
tournament horses, or the hobnailed shoon of
turbulent countrymen, brought up by Cade and
other violent reformers.

What old St. Martin's church was like, we may
not know; it has passed into " air, thin air," or
rather into the thick air of London, the murky,
coppery, witch smoke that wraps our Babel. Its
altars, tombs, and shrines are gone, its kaleidoscope
windows, its starry chapels, the music
chamber of its bell-tower— gone, with the king
who built it, and with his three great victims—
Surrey the poet, Fisher the aged saint, and More
philosopher and statesman.

And now we have in its stead the pompous
fabric of pedant Gibbs, of Aberdeen; a man
learned, but without genius, who, in five years,
and at a cost of 32,000l., built this lifeless church
with the besmoked pillars and the high steps,
grateful to beggar-boys. This is the dull, hard-
faced pedant, with the cataract of wig we know
by Hysing's portrait; Gibbs, the little, pert, and
squab-faced kindly man whom Hogarth drew,
and who designed the poet Prior's monument in
the Abbey; Gibbs, the hide-bound Aberdeen
man, who went to Italy to learn how to copy and
to jabber about Palladio and Vitruvius; Gibbs,
who built St. Mary's in the Strand, one of the
fifty new churches of his age, and who put
together the Ratcliffe Library and the Senate
House. Gibbs, though a non-juror and a Scotchman
— both suspicious circumstances in a rebellious
age, when many faces were straining their
eyes over the water— was a kindly man, and was
aided by Wren when that great little man had
been disgraced at Court, and was living in stoic
retirement at Hampton Court; he got churches
to build when Vanbrugh, that Swift and Pope
laughed at a little unjustly, could not get one to
do, because his comedies had disgusted the
clergy. Dull and ponderous as the eternal black-
and-white monument of that Aberdeen merchant's
son, whom the Earl of Mar first patronised, may
seem to us, it is a curious record of Hogarth's
age, of its architectural religion, and its imitative
sham architecture. Yet it was praised by
Sir William Chambers, the friend of Goldsmith
and Johnson, the Chinese decorator of Kew
Gardens, and the builder of Somerset House. I
do not know what Chambers did not say of St.
Martin's Church; he compared its portico to
that of the Pantheon at Rome, which certainly
has the same number of Corinthian columns.
Savage, in his mad poem The Wanderer, burst
out in boisterous bathos:

     O Gibbs! whose art the solemn fane can raise
     Where God delights to dwell, and man to praise—

verses no more absurd than those of
Wordsworth's sonnet—

                    Dear Jones, when you or I—

but requiring some brave contempt for humorous
association before they can be comfortably
swallowed, besides the confusion of the meaning as
to whether the church is where man praises, or is
a building that he praises, not to mention their
want of connexion with anything in the rambling
poem. We admit the compact beauty and unity
of the portico, as well as the simplicity and
neatness of the interior, but the steeple is a heap of
stone crushing in the porch, and there is no
contrasting day and night of light and shade in the
crude dull building, with its upper and lower
deck windows, its sham rustic work, and its rows
of tea-urn ornaments. It looks dead and
soulless, and with the handle of a steeple snapped
off would be the very thing for an assembly-
room, which at present, with the staring royal
arms cut in stone over the entrance, it not a
little resembles.

Death is something like misfortune— it makes
us acquainted with strange bedfellows. There,
in snug vaulting, under those six ponderous
black-and-white pillars, and that tower with
the bodkin holes through it to let put the bell
music, lie as strange an assembly of incongruous
people as Death ever invited to his silent soirée.
Here are met proud statesmen and rich painters,
play-writers and actors, the rouge all off, the
frown smoothed away, the sneer gone, all
wrapped in the grave-dress, that changes with
no fashion, that is cool enough for summer, and
hot enough for winter. Here is lively Farquhar,
the quondam officer; Roubilliac, the great
sculptor and the friend of Garrick; John
Hunter (just removed); witty Bannister, the
actor; the learned Boyle, the contemporary of
Newton ; poor, kind-hearted Nell Gwynne;
Dobson, the painter, whom Vandyck dug out of
his garret; Secretary Coventry, and Mayerne,
the learned French physician of James I., who
was the first to write on the chemistry of colours,
and gathered some of his receipts from the lips of
Vandyck himself.

If you wander up St. Martin's-lane now, not
altogether careful whether you walk on the