dent, and must be made more humble and subservient; and so on. In short, money, and taking away money, are the only things in question; and no master-minds in the country at large, (for one must not look, it would be unfair to do so, to a few marked public men,) seem to come forward and meet this stupid delusion, which, though it may begin with lowering the clergy, or, in other words, depriving them of that, a great part of which even the worst of them cannot help using for the public benefit, and which the best desire in order effectually to promote it, will end, of course, in loss and evil to the public itself. We perish in all points by little views and little men, or because they who have larger views intellectually, and see the truth, are morally feeble, and despair of being able to promote those views, in the present degraded state of the popular mind, by a bold assertion of them. But the political evil of these low views is far less than the moral. That "money is the root of all evil" we are taught in a book whose authority we cannot doubt; and by such means as have been described it has become lord of the ascendant. One of its great evils is that it is made the rule and law and canon by which everything is adjusted; that not only public acts and public stations, but every action and every situation is looked at to see what it will bring,-not whether duty, principle, honour, require us to do or avoid the act, to take or decline the station. God's word and law lose their hold: a wise expediency becomes the avowed rule; our own gain, the real one. WEST WICKHAM, KENT. THE village which has been selected to form the subject of the present article, is one of the most pleasant and rural within the same distance of the metropolis; placed at nearly equal distance between the towns of Croydon and Bromley, and still farther removed from the increasing suburbs of the capital, it retains all the quiet and seclusion of the most remote hamlet. The resident of the metropolis may reach it by a ride of little more than ten miles; and when he exchanges so quickly the bustle of the city for the peace of the village, he will the more readily feel and appreciate the truth and beauty of Gilbert West's verses, dictated by his abode in this pleasant situation : : "Not wrapt in smoky London's sulphurous clouds, And not far distant, stands my rural cot; Neither obnoxious to intruding crowds, "And when too much repose brings on the spleen, "Lines inscribed on a summer-house at Wickham." Towards the east the parish is bounded by Hayes, the place of sepulture of the great Earl of Chatham; in an opposite direction is the village of Addington, in Surrey, with the country residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which is seen from the churchyard. In the immediate neighbourhood was the Roman station of Noviomagus, the site of which has long been a subject of dispute amongst antiquaries.* During the Roman period the germ of the present village may have been raised, as its name, gothicized from Vicus, seems to testify. At the compilation of the Doomsday survey the church was not in existence; the village had been bestowed by the Conqueror on his brother Odo, the powerful Bishop of Baieux;‡ and in the reign of Edward I., anno 1278, Sir Peter de Huntingfield, one of the "brave Kentish gentlemen" who attended that monarch in his expedition into Scotland, appears to have held the manor of West Wickham. Under the auspices of the family of this knight the village increased in importance. That the consequence of the place was greater at that early period than at present is evident by the grant of a weekly market, so long ago as the 11th of Edward II., which was made to the son of Sir Peter de Huntingfield this market has long been discontinued, and the place has sunk from a town into a village. The principal buildings now remaining are the church and mansion, styled Wickham Court, situated together, at about half a mile from the little group of houses which constitutes the present village. The mansion-house is a large quadrangular pile of brick, with octagon towers at the angles. It has lost much of its picturesque appearance, in consequence of the introduction of sash windows, and the removal of the cupolas or spires, originally the finish of the octagon towers. But this injurious process of modernizing has not effaced entirely the character which marks the residences of the old English gentry. The mansion was erected by Sir Henry Heydon, in the reign of Henry VII., and has descended *It may, perhaps, have been at Croydon, although a writer of great research (A. J. Kempe, Esq., in Archæologia, vol. xxii. 336) has brought forward a mass of evidence to fix its situation near Holwood Hill, in the adjacent parish of Keston. A relic of the manners of its first inhabitants appears to have survived to recent times. The historian of the county, Hasted, (vol. i. page 109,) mentions an odd custom at this place, which he thinks arose from a more ancient heathen practice. In Rogation week a number of young men meet together, and with a hideous noise run into the orchards, encircling each tree, and pronouncing these words : Stand fast root, bear well top, God send us a youling sop! Ev'ry bough, apple enow! For this incantation they expect a gratuity, and if disappointed they anathematised the tree and the owner with a curse as insignificant. Hasted considers the term "youling" to be derived from Eolus, the god of the winds, and the procession was intended to indicate a favourable blast. Hasted, vol. i. p. 107. through a series of families to the present possessor, the Rev. Sir Charles Farnaby, the patron and incumbent of the church. At the middle of the last century Wickham acquired a literary celebrity, from the residence of Gilbert West, and the visits of Pitt and Lyttelton; but, much as the presence of these great men graced its retirement, it derived its brightest lustre from the author of the "Observations on the Resurrection," for here he was made the humble but effectual instrument of converting from scepticism and infidelity, and convincing of the matchless value of the truths of Christianity, the noble author of the "Dissertation on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul," produced under the conviction which happily resulted from his intercourse with Mr. West. The church is closely adjacent to the grounds of the hall; the gate of entrance to the church-yard is covered by one of those picturesque pent-houses which are seen in so many Kentish church-yards, the use of which was to shelter from the weather the "priest and clerks" as they waited, according to the Rubric, "to meet the corps at the entrance of the church-yard,” an ancient custom still in use, and so appropriate to the solemn occasion, and the admirable burial service of our national church, that, it is to be hoped, the practice will never be suffered to sink into disuse. The structure of the church is more ancient than its general appearance at first sight appears to indicate. It is said, by Leland, to have been rebuilt by Sir Henry Heydon at the same time that he built the "Court;" but a glance at the interior will shew that only the outer walls could have been the work of this benefactor. The church is composed of a nave and north aisle, and a square tower, which is not situated, as usual, at the west end, but is attached to the south wall of the nave, its basement forming a porch to the main building. The architecture proves that it was erected at an earlier period than the reign of Henry VII. The picturesque appearance of the building is destroyed by some injudicious alterations; the nave and aisle being comprehended under one roof, instead of shewing a clerestory,-an alteration of modern times very common in old churches, and greatly destructive of their beauty. The period may be about the times of James I., when the tower and church received some repairs. The tower is low and square, and is destitute of the usual finish to the Kentish steeples-a dwarf spire, which, it is apprehended, was the original termination of the present. The walls of the church and tower are entirely covered with plaster, and the roof is tiled, which combine to give a tame and modern character to the structure. The windows to the church are uniform, and appear to be of the age of Sir Henry Heydon. The structure still retains, in the interior arrangement, the original distribution into nave and chancel; the size of the latter is rather disproportionate, being greater than the half of the entire length; the church is divided longitudinally by five arches, of which two are comprised in the nave, and the residue in the chancel. The archi Speaking of the purchases of Sir Henry, of which Wickham was one, he says, "He purchased 300 markes of land yn yerely rent, whereof an hunderith 7 by the yere, is at Wikam, by Lewsham, in Surrey, toward Croydon, wher he buildid a right fair manor-place, and a fair churche."-Itin. vol. iv. part i. fol. 15. |