italfields weaver, or the hungering faces of the group of labourers
clustered from morning till night round the gates of the docks and
watching for the wind that brings the ships up the river: poetry in its
past, in strange old-fashioned squares, in quaint gabled houses, in grey
village churches, that have been caught and overlapped and lost, as it
were, in the great human advance that has carried London forward from
Whitechapel, its limit in the age of the Georges, to Stratford, its
bound in that of Victoria.

Stepney is a belated village of this sort; its grey old church of St.
Dunstan, buried as it is now in the very heart of East London, stood
hardly a century ago among the fields. All round it lie tracts of human
life without a past; but memories cluster thickly round "Old Stepney,"
as the people call it with a certain fond reverence, memories of men
like Erasmus and Colet and the group of scholars in whom the Reformation
began. It was to the country house of the Dean of St. Paul's, hard by
the old church of St. Dunstan, that Erasmus betook him when tired of the
smoke and din of town. "I come to drink your fresh air, my Colet," he
writes, "to drink yet deeper of your rural peace." The fields and hedges
through which Erasmus loved to ride remained fields and hedges within
living memory; only forty years ago a Londoner took his Sunday outing
along the field path which led past the London Hospital to what was
still the suburban village church of Stepney. But the fields through
which the path led have their own church now, with its parish of dull
straight streets of monotonous houses already marked with premature
decay, and here and there alleys haunted by poverty and disease and
crime.

There is nothing marked about either church or district; their character
and that of their people are of the commonest East-end type. If I ask my
readers to follow me to this parish of St. Philip, it is simply because
these dull streets and alleys were chosen by a brave and earnest man as
the scene of his work among the poor. It was here that Edward Denison
settled in the autumn of 1867, in the second year of the great "East
London Distress." In the October of 1869 he left England on a fatal
voyage from which he was never to return. The collection of his letters
which has been recently printed by Sir Baldwyn Leighton has drawn so
much attention to the work which lay within the narrow bounds of those
two years that I may perhaps be par