Back again to Canterbury, where it is to be hoped our leisure will permit us to loiter, or which our good fortune may allow us to visit again and yet again.

Canterbury sits between History and Romance, the chief city of one of the most delightful and most interesting of English counties. Her streets are thronged with memories, crowded with historic figures. Romance and History mingle inextricably—Chaucer, Marlowe, Dickens; Augustine, Becket, Cranmer. In these pages an endeavour has been made to depict Canterbury and some of the surrounding country not with the pen of the historian or of the archÆologist, but to set forth rather the personal impressions of a lover of old times, old ways and old books. Christ Church Cathedral is to him no mere record in cold stone of a dead past, but a living memorial of a living past. It is meant to be a book for those who share with the writer his delight in calling up to the mind’s eye ghosts of men and women dead and gone.

At first, as has been said, Canterbury strikes disappointingly on those who go thither thinking to step back straightway from the present into the past. But gradually and surely the past overpowers the present as we linger in its narrow streets and loiter in its ancient buildings. It is no city of the dead. The life of to-day throbs in its veins; but its to-day is dull, dim and uneventful compared with its stirring, many-coloured past.

These pages have touched upon many matters concerning which many volumes have been, and will be, written; but no attempt has been made at completeness. This book is not a guide, but rather aims at being a sign-post—pointing to the past. For many years yet pilgrims will come to Canterbury, and if this little work helps any of them to see and to hear there what has been so vivid and so clear to the writer of it, the object with which it is set forth will have been gained.