If the confession that I have often travelled from this Covent Garden lodging of mine on
Sundays, should give offence to those who never travel on Sundays, they will be satisfied
(I hope) by my adding that the journeys in question were made to churches.
Not that I have any curiosity to hear powerful preachers. Time was, when I was dragged
by the hair of my head, as one may say, to hear too many. On summer evenings, when
every flower, and tree, and bird, might have better addressed my soft young heart, I have
in my day been caught in the palm of a female hand by the crown, have been violently
scrubbed from the neck to the roots of the hair as a purification for the Temple, and have
then been carried off highly charged with saponaceous electricity, to be steamed like a
potato in the unventilated breath of the powerful Boanerges Boiler and his congregation,
until what small mind I had, was quite steamed out of me. In which pitiable plight I have
been haled out of the place of meeting, at the conclusion of the exercises, and catechised
respecting Boanerges Boiler, his fifthly, his sixthly, and his seventhly, until I have
regarded that reverend person in the light of a most dismal and oppressive Charade. Time
was, when I was carried off to platform assemblages at which no human child, whether of
wrath or grace, could possibly keep its eyes open, and when I felt the fatal sleep stealing,
stealing over me, and when I gradually heard the orator in possession, spinning and
humming like a great top, until he rolled, collapsed, and tumbled over, and I discovered
to my burning shame and fear, that as to that last stage it was not he, but I. I have sat
under Boanerges when he has specifically addressed himself to us - us, the infants - and
at this present writing I hear his lumbering jocularity (which never amused us, though we
basely pretended that it did), and I behold his big round face, and I look up the inside of
his outstretched coat-sleeve as if it were a telescope with the stopper on, and I hate him
with an unwholesome hatred for two hours. Through such means did it come to pass that
I knew the powerful preacher from beginning to end, all over and all through, while I was
very young, and that I left him behind at an early period of life. Peace be with him! More
peace than he brought to me!
Now, I have heard many preachers since that time - not powerful; merely Christian,
unaffected, and reverential - and I have had many such preachers on my roll of friends.
But, it was not to hear these, any more than the powerful class, that I made my Sunday
journeys. They were journeys of curiosity to the numerous churches in the City of
London. It came into my head one day, here had I been cultivating a familiarity with all
the churches of Rome, and I knew nothing of the insides of the old churches of London!
This befell on a Sunday morning. I began my expeditions that very same day, and they
lasted me a year.
I never wanted to know the names of the churches to which I went, and to this hour I am
profoundly ignorant in that particular of at least nine-tenths of them. Indeed, saying that I
know the church of old GOWER'S tomb (he lies in effigy with his head upon his books)
to be the church of Saint Saviour's, Southwark; and the church of MILTON'S tomb to be
the church of Cripplegate; and the church on Cornhill with the great golden keys to be the
