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 m. the Little Cloister, 
which rT . 0" ! •:>?' Co memo feeto The 
noise cub O; . o - T- .-vm . ■ ••. . ■ mo ,. ■ . f dtmly 
heard ■ in Hu m \ not as 
boisterous a-* when Horam VvaimT Hanoi to face them 
:i!opc- ••eon to Hsi-- his mother’s tomb. u 1 litend.lv had 
not c&umgg 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 roil of those who had passed away, besides 
others then Hong, such as Gibbon and Warren H ue mgs, 
who car: H r - he tradition of this classic ground. 
In ne:;::': times there were many gardens within the 
precincts c f ? m Abbey, besides the infirmary garden ; but 
vt difficult to )orate all of them with certainty, although 
the ktes of sonic are known. The abbot's garden lay 
Y 333 A H 3 T 2 WIMT 23 W . 5 I 3 T 2 IOJD 3 JTTIJ 3 HT 
covered pari 
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