In an age of many elaborate and tasteless monuments, Stow's is singularly interesting and tasteful. An almost life-size figure of him is seated, dressed in a long robe, before a table on which rests a book in which he is writing. The whole is placed within a niche in the tomb; upon the sculptured sides, the artist has carved, among other devices, a beggar's wallet, indicative of Stow's poverty, for which James I. in his old age issued him letters patent permitting him to solicit aid. These letters grant "to our loving subject, John Stow, who hath to his own great charge, and with neglect to his ordinary means of maintenance, for the general good of Posteritie, as well as the present age, compiled and published diverse necessary books and chronicles, and therefore we in recompense of his painful labours, and for the encouragement of the like ... authorise him and his deputies to collect among our loving subjects their contributions and kind gratuities." Thus was the man who has chiefly contributed to our knowledge of ancient London allowed in his extreme old age to live in unappreciation and neglect.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. ANDREW UNDERSHAFT IN 1737
The visitor cannot but query, as he surveys the handsome monument erected to him by his wife, how this was paid for, but there are many explanations that suggest themselves.
Many a time may Milton as a boy and man have stood before this tomb, and viewed the fine timber roof and the late Perpendicular windows, which to-day remain just as he saw them. If the modern visitor would study the fashions of his day, he can do no better than inspect such monuments as the costly Hammersley erected here. The date thereon is 1636, when Milton was a young man of twenty-eight. The absence in the life-size kneeling figure of the huge stiff crinoline on the tombs of a little earlier date shows that the fashions changed as sharply as in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The date of the handsome organ is 1695.
CROSBY HALL.--ST. HELEN'S.--ST. ETHELBURGA'S.--ST. GILES'S, CRIPPLEGATE
Passing by the tiny churchyard of St. Andrew Undershaft, by several narrow and obscure passages amid crowded business blocks, one comes upon the famous Crosby Hall on Bishopsgate Street. This presents to-day one of the most picturesque examples of the beam and plaster houses of the fifteenth century to be found in England. It was, says Stow, "the highest at that time in London," that is, about 1475. Doubtless his reference is to a high turret which once surmounted it, but of which no traces now remain. This was before the more pretentious Tudor buildings of the next century, of whose high towers Stow's biographer says: "He could not endure the high turrets and buildings run up to a great height, which some citizens in his time laid out their money upon to overtop and overlook their neighbours. Such sort of advanced works, both towers and chimneys, they built both in their summerhouses in Moorfields and in other places in the suburbs, and in their dwelling houses in the City itself. They were like midsummer Pageants, 'not so much for use and profit as for show and pleasure,' 'bewraying,' said he, 'the vanities of men's minds. And that it was unlike to the disposition of the ancient citizens, who delighted in the building of hospitals and almshouses for the poor; and therein both employed their wits, and spent their wealth in the preferment of the common commodity of this our city.'"