Rarely was a shop to be remarked among the neat little
tenements, many of them built of curious old brick, and all of
them raised without any regard to symmetry or proportion. Not
the sound of a single wheel was heard; sometimes not a single
individual was visible or stirring. Making a circuitous
course through this tranquil and orderly district, they at
last found themselves in an open place in the centre of which
rose a church of vast proportions, and built of hewn stone in
that stately, not to say ponderous, style which Vanburgh
introduced. The area round it, which was sufficiently ample,
was formed by buildings, generally of a very mean character:
the long back premises of a carpenter, the straggling yard of
a hackney-man: sometimes a small, narrow isolated private
residence, like a waterspout in which a rat might reside:
sometimes a group of houses of more pretension. In the
extreme corner of this area, which was dignified by the name
of Smith's Square, instead of taking a more appropriate title
from the church of St John which it encircled, was a large old
house, that had been masked at the beginning of the century
with a modern front of pale-coloured bricks, but which still
stood in its courtyard surrounded by its iron railings,
withdrawn as it were from the vulgar gaze like an individual
who had known higher fortunes, and blending with his humility
something of the reserve which is prompted by the memory of
vanished greatness.
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