The old church of St. Sepulcher’s, formerly at the confluence of Snow Hill and the Old Bailey, now lifts its head far above the pompous viaduct which spans the valley along which the Fleet Ditch once flowed.  All the registers of burial in the church were destroyed by the great fire of 1666, which burnt down the edifice from floor to roof, leaving only the walls and tower standing.  Mr. Charles Deane, whose lively interest in Smith led him recently to pay a visit to St. Sepulcher’s, speaks of it as the church “under the pavement of which the remains of our hero were buried; but he was not able to see the stone placed over those remains, as the floor of the church at that time was covered with a carpet....  The epitaph to his memory, however, it is understood, cannot now be deciphered upon the tablet,”—­which he supposes to be the one in Stow.

The existing tablet is a slab of bluish-black marble, which formerly was in the chancel.  That it in no way relates to Captain Smith a near examination of it shows.  This slab has an escutcheon which indicates three heads, which a lively imagination may conceive to be those of Moors, on a line in the upper left corner on the husband’s side of a shield, which is divided by a perpendicular line.  As Smith had no wife, this could not have been his cognizance.  Nor are these his arms, which were three Turks’ heads borne over and beneath a chevron.  The cognizance of “Moors’ heads,” as we have said, was not singular in the Middle Ages, and there existed recently in this very church another tomb which bore a Moor’s head as a family badge.  The inscription itself is in a style of lettering unlike that used in the time of James I., and the letters are believed not to belong to an earlier period than that of the Georges.  This bluish-black stone has been recently gazed at by many pilgrims from this side of the ocean, with something of the feeling with which the Moslems regard the Kaaba at Mecca.  This veneration is misplaced, for upon the stone are distinctly visible these words: 

     “Departed this life September....
      ....sixty-six ....years....
        ....months ....”

As John Smith died in June, 1631, in his fifty-second year, this stone is clearly not in his honor:  and if his dust rests in this church, the fire of 1666 made it probably a labor of wasted love to look hereabouts for any monument of him.

A few years ago some American antiquarians desired to place some monument to the “Admiral of New England” in this church, and a memorial window, commemorating the “Baptism of Pocahontas,” was suggested.  We have been told, however, that a custom of St. Sepulcher’s requires a handsome bonus to the rector for any memorial set up in the church which the kindly incumbent had no power to set aside (in his own case) for a foreign gift and act of international courtesy of this sort; and the project was abandoned.