cathedral church, which, in contradistinction from the earlier edifice
and from that which has superseded it, we now familiarly designate "Old
St. Paul's."

It must have been a church calculated to inspire the admiration,
veneration, and pride of Londoners. Its lofty spire, covered with
ornamental lead, rose high above every other building near it. It
dominated the City and all the surrounding district. The spire itself
was over two hundred feet high, and, perched upon a lofty tower, it rose
about five hundred feet into the blue sky. The few old views which give
a picture of St. Paul's before the storm of 1561 clearly show the
magnificent proportions of the spire.

At the east end, a most beautiful and well-proportioned composition was
the famous rose-window, forty feet in diameter, referred to as a
familiar object by Chaucer.

The magnificent Norman nave, which well deserved admiration on account
of its architectural merit, acquired even greater celebrity under the
designation of Paul's Walk as a famous meeting-place and promenade of
fashionable folk.

Here bargaining and dealing were carried on openly and unchecked. Many
English writers refer to this extraordinary desecration of a consecrated
building, and from them we learn that the trading carried on in Paul's
Walk included simony and chaffering for benefices. Chaucer, in the
prologue to his _Canterbury Tales_, when describing the parson,
writes:--

"He sette not his Benefice to hire,
And lette his shepe accombred in the mire,
And ran unto London, unto S. Paules
To seken him a Chanterie for soules,
Or with a Brotherhede to be withold
But dwelt at home, and kept well his folde."

The expression "to dine with Duke Humphrey," applied to persons who,
being unable either to procure a dinner by their own money or from the
favour of their friends, walk about and loiter during the dinner-time,
had its origin in one of the aisles of St. Paul's, which was called Duke
Humphrey's Walk: not that there ever was in reality a cenotaph there to
the Duke's memory, who, as everyone knows, was buried at St. Albans, in
Hertfordshire, but because, says Stow, ignorant people mistook the fair
monument of Sir John Beauchamp, who died in 1358, and which was in the
south side of the body of the church, for that of Humphrey, Duke of
Gloucester.

[Illustration: THE CLOTH FAIR SMITHFIELD.

_Looking to the south-west, and showing the north side of the
street.