After speaking of the disrepair and squalor which, although far indeed from being universal, were too frequently noticeable in the churches of the last age, it might seem a natural transition to pass on to the singularly incongruous uses to which the naves of some of our principal ecclesiastical buildings were in a few instances perverted.  In the minds of modern Churchmen there would be the closest connection between culpable neglect of the sacred fabric, and the profanation of it by admission within its walls of the sights and sounds of common daily business or pleasure.  There was something of this in the period under review.  The extraordinary desecrations once general in St. Paul’s belong indeed chiefly to the latter half of the 16th and the first half of the 17th centuries.  Most readers are more or less familiar with the accounts given of ‘Paul’s Walk’ in the old days,—­how it was not only ’the recognised resort of wits and gallants, and men of fashion and of lawyers,’[872] but also, as Evelyn called it, ’a stable of horses and a den of thieves’[873]—­a common market, where Shakspeare makes Falstaff buy a horse as he would at Smithfield[874]—­usurers in the south aisle, horse-dealers in the north, and in the midst ’all kinds of bargains, meetings, and brawlings.’[875] Before the eighteenth century began, ‘Paul’s Walk’ was, in all its main features, a thing of the past.  Yet a good deal more than the mere tradition of it remained.  In a pamphlet published in 1703, ‘Jest’ asks ‘Earnest’ whether he has been at St. Paul’s, and seen the flux of people there.  ‘And what should I do there,’ says the latter, ’where men go out of curiosity and interest, and not for the sake of religion?  Your shopkeepers assemble there as at full ’Change, and the buyers and sellers are far from being cast out of the Temple.’[876] At Durham there was a regular thoroughfare across the nave until 1750, and at Norwich until 1748, when Bishop Gooch stopped it.  The naves of York and Durham Cathedral were fashionable promenades.[877] The Confessor’s Chapel made, on occasion, a convenient playground for Westminster scholars, who were allowed, as late as 1829, to keep the scenes for their annual play in the triforium of the north transept.[878] Nevertheless ‘Paul’s Walk’ and all customs in any way akin to it, so far as they survived into the last century, had in reality little or nothing to do with the irreligion and neglect of which the century has been sorely, and not causelessly accused.  Rather, they were the relics of customs which had not very long fallen into desuetude.  The time had been, and was not so very long past, when the stalls and bazaars of St. Paul’s Cathedral did but illustrate on a large scale what might be seen on certain days in almost all the churches of the kingdom.  Our forefathers in the Middle Ages drew a broad line of distinction between the chancel and the nave.  The former was looked upon as sanctified exclusively to religious uses; the latter was regarded