of a dwarfed court, a nest of dealers in theatrical finery, dancing-shoes, pasteboard rounds of beef and cutlets, stage armor, and second-hand play-books.  Between Marquis Court on the one hand, Russell Court on the other, and a miserable alley called Cross Court which connects them, is what appears at first sight to be a solid block of tenements.  The graveyard is in the very heart of this populous block.  The door of one of the houses stood open, and through a barred staircase window at the back of the entry I caught a glimpse of a patch of grass—­a sight so strange in this part of London that I went around to the other side of the block to examine further.

There I found the “reeking little tunnel.”  It is merely a stone-paved passage about four feet wide through the ground floor of a tenement.  House doors open into it.  A lamp hangs over the entrance.  A rusty iron gate closes it at the farther end.  Here is the “pestiferous and obscene churchyard,” completely hemmed in by the habitations of the living.  Few of the graves are marked, and most of the tombstones remaining are set up on end against the walls of the houses.  Perhaps a church stood there once, but there is none now.  The burials are no longer permitted in this hideous spot, the people of the block, when they shut their doors at night, shut the dead in with them.  The dishonoring of the old graves goes on briskly.  Inside the gate lay various rubbish—­a woman’s boot, a broken coal scuttle, the foot of a tin candlestick, fragments of paper, sticks, bones, straw—­unmentionable abominations; and over the dismal scene a reeking, smoke-laden fog spread darkness and moisture.

The Temple church [Footnote:  From “Walks in London.”]

BY AUGUSTUS J.C.  HARE

By Inner Temple Lane we reach the only existing relic of the residence of the Knights Templars in these courts, their magnificent Temple Church (St Mary’s), which fortunately just escaped the Great Fire in which most of the Inner Temple perished.  The church was restored in 1839-42 at an expense of L70,000, but it has been ill-done, and with great disregard of the historic memorials it contained.

It is entered by a grand Norman arch under the western porch, which will remind those who have traveled in France of the glorious door of Loches.  This opens upon the Round Church of 1185 (fifty-eight feet in diameter), built in recollection of the Round Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of the only four remaining round churches in England; the others being at Cambridge, Northampton, and Maplestead in Essex.  Hence, between graceful groups of Purbeck marble columns, we look into the later church of 1240; these two churches, built only at a distance of fifty-five years from each other, forming one of the most interesting examples we possess of the transition from Norman to Early English architecture.  The Round Church is surrounded by an arcade of narrow Early English arches, separated by a series of heads, which are chiefly restorations.  On the pavement lie two groups of restored effigies of “associates” of the Temple (not Knights Templars), carved in freestone, being probably the “eight images of armed knights” mentioned by Stow in 1598....