Rising from amid the trees immediately before you, at the entrance to the town and the branching of High Street and All Saints’ Street, is All Saints’ Church, the other of the two old churches of the Old Town. It stands immediately at the foot of that great chalky down which drops sheer to the sea and is known as East Cliff; and its crowded churchyard, hemmed in with grimy houses, runs at a steep angle up the hillside. I am not greatly impressed with the interior of the church, but its tower is altogether admirable. It has that best thing in towers, sturdiness, and with its deeply splayed buttresses, strongly marked stringcourses, and general air of refined emphasis, is the embodiment of strength and beauty. I feel especially grateful to it, for it stands just where it should for pictorial composition, at the head of the old street, and it and the old “White Hart” inn form excellent foils to one another, as Church and Inn should do. They are as antithetic, in the sentiment of the scene, as light and shade are in the rendering of it.
Let those who are desirous of immortal fame see that an eccentric epitaph marks the spot where they lie. There is no surer passport to eternal recollection. Thus, apart from “Old Humphrey,” a local celebrity who lies here, the hundreds of the dear departed might be anonymous for all any one cares; excepting three only. Even the casual, unobservant stranger entering the church can scarce help seeing the epitaph on “John Archdeacon,” who died in 1820, aged nine; but if he did not see it, it is quite certain his attention would soon be drawn that way, for it is a cherished local curiosity:
Here lies an only darling Boy
Who was his widow’d Mother’s joy;
Her grief and sad affliction prove
How tenderly she did him love.
In childish play he teas’d a mule
Which rag’d its angry owner’s soul,
And through whose angry blows and spleen
This child so soon a corpse was seen.