Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/158

 124 NOTES AND QUERIES. [izs.ix.Ano.i8.ion. tion, and other societies (varying with the neighbourhood of the workshop) ; and all these could be hired. Indeed, I have " played at buryings " with the '' Masonic" insignia and tools, when " Mr. Mould " (our next-door neighbour) and his subordinate employees were away on " business." The many " duds " among the coffin-nails were our buttons. Moreover, I have ever held in mind the reveries of Price, the old Stepney parish clerk and factotum of the Rev. Richard Lee, rector of Stepney, when I, a musing boy, accompanied him in his medi- tations among the tombs of the reputed kk sea parish." He was full of tales of what Freemasons, or reputed Freemasons, old and new, had done to the church and churchyard ornaments in the days of grave civil and religious disorders ; and over these memories my father and Price had, years before, often wrestled and wrangled when they ought to have been heeding their rector's very dull, if very learned, sermons. The Rev. Richard Lee, M.A., who became Rector of Stepney in June, 1847, " testified " at a conference of clerics and magistrates in his rectory parlour (a troop of the Guards being posted in sight at the narrow gut of Stepney High Street) on the rather anxious day of the 10th April, 1848, when the Chartists proposed to hold a meeting of 200,000 men on Kennington Common, to march thence in procession to Westminster to " present a petition " to Parliament, a la Lord George Gordon. It was to the effect that in the times of his predecessors, the Rev. Ralph Cawley, M.A., the Rev. Giles Fairclough Haddon, D.D., and almost all the others who had officiated in person up to the Rev. Daniel Vaudrey, M.A., the belief of the Church officials was that the association of " Antient " Freemasonry with the old Stepney Vestry, and, consequently, with the Trinity Guild and Corporation, was lengthened and most intimate ; also that the belief was general among the educated in Stepney that the original Spert family memorial bore mystic Masonic signs similar to those once subsequently found in the churches and churchyards of Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Wapping, Shadwell, and even in the Queen Anne church of Limehouse. Mr. Mellish, a prominent local magistrate and a Freemason, said there were persons in his family who had seen Masonic signs worked in at each corner of the Trinity pall, and upon the reputed furniture of the court room of the Trinity House at Ratcliffe. There were other magistrates and clerics present who testified similarly, and one said he had seen what purported to be the Trinity j pall in the hands of a New York dealer in curios who tried to induce Washington Irving to buy. And the then rector of White - chapel (the Rev. W. W. Champneys, M.A.) said he had been reliably informed that some of the furniture in the offices and ! Leadenhall Street bore some of these symbolic markings, although they were of Oriental manufacture ; and he had always ! understood from the old officials that, in the structure of the old edifice there were these mystic signs to be found, " as had been predecessor in his rectorate. Nevertheless, the ever- cautious, if idealis- tic, grand secretary of the Freemasons re- united Laurence Dermott -nearly sixty years before (when he dwelt in Mile End aiid in Leyton near by) does not appear to have accepted the popular implication with any enthusiasm. Indeed, he expressly pointed out that in the old days in the North and in Ireland, Masonic emblems were apparently used by working guildsmen as a sign of professional handicraft and ornament at ion r or simply in pride of their craft, without reference to the personality of the interred ; and that as a fact these emblems were some- times clumsily removed by church authori- ties, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Dis- senting, on the pretext that they were merely trade advertisements. In short, Laurence Dermott's personal knowledge of the loose practices of many of those who held charge of Freemasonic, " Trinity,'' and other guild regalia in the Port ot London accentuated his desire not to accept Masonic occultism as necessarily imolved in the use of the brotherhood's insignia. Laurence Dermott's reminder, of course, met the occasion of a moment when the occultism of Freemasonry was being widely aspersed ; but it by no means disposed of the evidence that there was a time, in respect of symbolism and ornamentation, when,, as Ruskin always insisted, the guildsmen masters, craftsmen, and apprentices of the " mistery " enjoyed work for work's sake without a thought of self -advertise- ment without a notion that the title of "working man" was, as some degenerate Sam Tappertits latterly spout, " a badge of serfdom imposed upon one particular
 * museum of the East India Company in
 * vaults of Whitechapel Church and in the
 * stated by the Rev. Daniel Mathias " a