----I do walk
Methinks like Guide Vaux, with my dark lanthorn,
Stealing to set the town o ?re; i th try
I should be taken for William o the Wisp,
Or Robin Goodfellow.
FLETCHER.
I AM somewhat of an antiquity-hunter, and am fond of expl London i of the relics of old times.
These are principally to be found in the depths of the city, swallowed up and almost lost in a wilderness of brid mortar, but deriving poetical and romantiterest from the onplace, prosaic world around them. I was struck with an instance of the kind in the course of a ret summer ramble into the city; for the city is only to be explored to advantage in summer-time, when free from the smoke and fog and rain and mud of winter. I had been buffeting for some time against the current of populatioing through Fleet Street. The warm weather had unstrung my nerves and made me sensitive to every jar and jostle and discordant sound. The ?esh was weary, the spirit faint, and I was getting out of humor with the bustling busy throng through which I had tle, when in a ?t of desperation I tore my way through the crowd, plunged into a by-lane, and, after passing through several obscure nooks and angles, emerged into a quaint and quiet court with a grassplot in the tre by elms, a perpetually fresh and green by a fountain with its sparkli of water. A student with book in hand was seated on a stone bench, partly reading, partly meditating on the movements of two or three trim nursery-maids with their infant charges.
I was like an Arab who had suddenly e upon an oasis amid the panting sterility of the desert. By degrees the quiet and ess of the place soothed my nerves and refreshed my spirit.
I pursued my walk, and came, hard by, to a very a chapel with a low-browed Saxon portal of massive and rich architecture.
The interior was circular and lofty and lighted from above.
Around were moal tombs of a date on which were extehe marble ef?gies of warriors in armor. Some had the hands devoutly crossed upon the breast; rasped the pommel of the sword, menag hostility even iomb, while the crossed legs of several indicated soldiers of the Faith who had been on crusades to the Holy Land.
I was, in fact, in the chapel of the Knights Templars, strangely situated in the very tre of sordid traf?d I do not know a more impressive lesson for the many of the world than thus suddenly to turn aside from the highway of busy money-seeking life, and sit down among these shadowy sepulchres, where all is twilight, dust, and fet-fullness.
In a subsequent tour of observation I entered another of these relics of a "fone world" locked up in the heart of the city. I had been wandering for some time through dull monotonous streets, destitute of anything to strike the eye or excite the imagination, when I beheld before me a Gothic gateway of mouldering antiquity. It opened into a spacious quadrangle f the courtyard of a stately Gothic pile, the portal of which stood invitingly open.
It arently a public edi?ce, and, as I was antiquity-hunting, I ventured in, though with dubious steps.
Meeting no oher to oppose or rebuke my intrusion, I tinued on until I found myself in a great hall with a lofty arched roof and oaken gallery, all of Gothic architecture. At one end of the hall was an enormous ?replace, with woodeles on each side; at the other end was a raised platform, or dais, the seat of state, above which was the portrait of a m