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 c