302 LONDON PARKS & GARDENS 



Any one standing in this suggestive spot will feel with 

 Washington Irving, that "The Cloisters still retain 

 something of the quiet and seclusion of former days. 

 The gray walls are discoloured by damps, and crumbling 

 with age ; a coat of hoary moss has gathered over the 

 inscriptions of the mural monuments, and obscured 

 the death's heads, and other mural emblems. The 

 sharp touches of the chisel are gone from the rich 

 tracery of the arches ; the roses which adorned the 

 keystones have lost their leafy beauty ; everything bears 

 marks of the gradual dilapidations of time, which yet 

 has something touching and pleasing in its very decay." 



These lines refer to the Great Cloister, but the quiet 

 and repose are still more noticeable in the Little Cloister, 

 which rarely echoes to the sound of hurrying feet. The 

 noise and laughter of Westminster scholars is only dimly 

 heard in this secluded corner. The boys are not as 

 boisterous as when Horace Walpole feared to face them 

 alone, even to visit his mother's tomb. " I literally had 

 not courage to venture alone among the Westminster 

 boys ; they are as formidable to me as the ship carpenters 

 at Portsmouth," he wrote in 1754. Even in those days 

 the list of eminent scholars was already a long one — 

 Hakluyt, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Dryden, Wren, 

 being on the roll of those who had passed away, besides 

 others then living, such as Gibbon and Warren Hastings, 

 who carried on the tradition of this classic ground. 



In monastic times there were many gardens within the 

 precincts of the Abbey, besides the infirmary garden ; but 

 it is difficult to locate all of them with certainty, although 

 the sites of some are known. The abbot's garden lay 

 in the north-west angle of the wall, and must have 

 covered part of the present Broad Sanctuary, including 



