t, I must frankly acknowledge that I never found it possible to give
five minutes' attention to any other English preaching: so cold and
commonplace are the homilies that pass for such, under the aged roofs of
churches. And as for cathedrals, the sermon is an exceedingly diminutive
and unimportant part of the religious services,--if, indeed, it be
considered a part,--among the pompous ceremonies, the intonations,
and the resounding and lofty-voiced strains of the choristers. The
magnificence of the setting quite dazzles out what we Puritans look
upon as the jewel of the whole affair; for I presume that it was our
forefathers, the Dissenters in England and America, who gave the sermon
its present prominence in the Sabbath exercises.

The Methodists are probably the first and only Englishmen who have
worshipped in the open air since the ancient Britons listened to the
preaching of the Druids; and it reminded me of that old priesthood, to
see certain memorials of their dusky epoch--not religious, however, but
warlike--in the neighborhood of the spot where the Methodist was holding
forth. These were some ancient burrows, beneath or within which are
supposed to lie buried the slain of a forgotten or doubtfully remembered
battle, fought on the site of Greenwich Park as long ago as two or three
centuries after the birth of Christ. Whatever may once have been their
height and magnitude, they have now scarcely more prominence in the
actual scene than the battle of which they are the sole monuments
retains in history,--being only a few mounds side by side, elevated a
little above the surface of the ground, ten or twelve feet in diameter,
with a shallow depression in their summits. When one of them was opened,
not long since, no bones, nor armor, nor weapons were discovered,
nothing but some small jewels, and a tuft of hair,--perhaps from the
head of a valiant general, who, dying on the field of his victory,
bequeathed this lock, together with his indestructible fame, to
after-ages. The hair and jewels are probably in the British Museum,
where the potsherds and rubbish of innumerable generations make the
visitor wish that each passing century could carry off all its fragments
and relics along with it, instead of adding them to the continually
accumulating burden which human knowledge is compelled to lug upon its
back. As for the fame, I know not what has become of it.

After traversing the Park, we come into the neighborhood of Gr