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 
