132 PRÆTERITA-I

152. And although I have dwelt with thankfulness on the many joys and advantages of these secluded years, the vigilant reader will not, I hope, have interpreted the accounts rendered of them into general praise of a like home education in the environs of London. But one farther good there was in it, hitherto unspoken; that great part of my acute perception and deep feeling of the beauty of architecture and scenery abroad, was owing to the well-formed habit of narrowing myself to happiness within the four brick walls of our fifty by one hundred yards of garden; and accepting with resignation the æsthetic external surroundings of a London suburb, and , yet more, of a London chapel. For Dr. Andrews’¹ was the Londonian chapel in its perfect type, definable as accurately as a Roman basilica,-an oblong, flat-ceiled barn, lighted by windows with semi-circular heads, brick-arched, filled by small-paned glass held by iron bars, like fine threaded halves of cobwebs; galleries propped on iron pipes, up both sides; pews, well shut in, each of them, by partitions of plain deal, and neatly brass-latched deal doors, filling the barn floor, all but its two lateral straw-matted passages; pulpit, sublimely isolated, central from sides and clear of altar rails at end; a stout, four-legged box of well-grained wainscot, high as the level of front galleries, and decorated with a cushion of crimson velvet, padded six inches thick, with gold tassels at the corners; which was a great resource to me when I was tired of the sermon, because I liked watching the rich colour of the folds and creases that came in it when the clergyman thumped it.

153. Imagine the change between one Sunday and the next,-from the morning service in this building, attended by the families of the small shopkeepers of the Walworth Road, in their Sunday trimmings; (our plumber’s wife, fat, good, sensible Mrs. Goad, sat in the next pew in front of us, sternly sensitive to the interruption of her devotion by

¹ [See above, pp. 71-72.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]