There is an old house outside the West Gate, built about 1563 on the site of an hostel, where, when the city gates were shut of a night time, belated pilgrims were wont to seek refreshment and rest. But as we stand and look at the ancient gables, and think of those still more ancient which these replaced, does any Canterbury Pilgrim come forth to greet us? No; but we have “stopped before a very old house bulging out over the road; a house with long, low lattice-windows bulging out still farther, and beams with carved heads on the ends bulging out too, so that,” we fancied, “the whole house was leaning forward, trying to see who was passing on the narrow pavement below. It was quite spotless in its cleanliness. The old-fashioned brass knocker on the low arched door, ornamented with carved garlands of fruit and flowers, twinkled like a star; the two stone steps descending to the door were as white as if they had been covered with fair linen; and all the angles and corners, and carvings and mouldings, and quaint little panes of glass, and quainter little windows, though as old as the hills, were as pure as any snow that ever fell upon the hills.”

We have never seen Uriah Heep peeping slyly out of those quaint little windows, for somehow Uriah has never quite lived for us; but we have seen Agnes there, to whom David eventually lost his heart—which has always seemed to us an unwise proceeding, for men do not like taking a permanent second place by marrying their

guardian angels; there have looked out at us old Mr Wickfield and young David, Miss Betsy Trotwood and Mr Dick—all very much alive. Then it is delightful on a frosty morning to see Doctor Strong bestowing his gaiters “on a beggar-woman, who occasioned some scandal in the neighbourhood by exhibiting a fine infant from door to door, wrapped in those garments, which were universally recognised, being as well known in the vicinity as the Cathedral.” But who would wish to meet the Old Soldier? And was it not Mr Micawber who came to “see the Cathedral. Firstly, on account of its being so well worth seeing.... And secondly, on account of the great probability of something turning up in a cathedral town”? Then we may sit, if we list, with little David in the Cathedral any Sunday morning, the sunless air, the sensation of the world being shut out, the resounding of the organ through the black-and-white arched galleries and aisles affecting us as they did him, being as wings that take us back to childish days.

A giant of a man meets us in these city streets, a long-legged, white-haired, bespectacled man, one who signed a letter “W. M. T.,” in which he wrote: “I passed an hour in the Cathedral, which seemed all beautiful to me; the fifteenth century part, the thirteenth century part, and the crypt above all, which they say is older than the Conquest.... Fancy the church quite full; the altar lined with pontifical gentlemen bobbing up and down; the dear little boys in white and red flinging about the incense pots; the music roaring out from the organs; all the monks and the clergy in their stalls, and the archbishop on his throne—oh, how fine! And then think of the ? of our Lord speaking quite simply to simple Syrian people, a child or two maybe at his knees, as he taught them that love was the truth.” Thus spake Thackeray the cynic.

In the days of Elizabeth—to be exact, in the year 1561, on May 22nd—John Marlowe was married to Catherine Arthur in the church of St George the Martyr, the said John being a man of some standing and a member later of the Guild of Shoemakers and Tanners. Then in the same church, in the year 1564, on February 26th was christened Christopher, the eldest son of the above. The boy when fourteen years of age won a scholarship in the King’s School, of which the master then was Nicholas Goldsborough. When Kit left the school we know not; he went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; he went to London; he wrote Faustus, Tamburlaine the Great, The Rich Jew of Malta, Edward II., Hero and Leander; sang

And there is a foolish monument to him, where once stood the butter-market, outside Christ Church gate. Of the man’s manner and appearance we know not anything; his works live, but the man is dead even to our mind’s eye. Yet there are some of us who would rather meet his shadow here than even those of Chaucer and of Dickens; perchance because we know him not.

Canterbury is yet in many ways a mediÆval city, despite railways and electric lights. We can enter it by the fourteenth century West Gate, built by Archbishop Simon of Sudbury, the one gateway mercifully spared to us out of six; then we can walk down an old-world High Street, overlooked by beetle-browed, gabled houses. Is not the King’s Bridge and the old home of the Canterbury Weavers quaintly beautiful? This old house dates back possibly to the fifteenth century, of course having been pulled about more or less by rude restorers; at any rate it is old, at any rate it is quaint. Stand thereby on a moonlit night, drink in the picturesqueness of the dark masses of black shadow and reflection, the bright masses of cold light; there is no corner more charming in Nuremberg or Rothenberg; the sluggish waters of the many-branched Stour flow beneath, and the air is tremulous with the chiming of bells from many a steeple. The passers-by of to-day are not those whom we should see, for we should bend our mind’s eye on monk, priest and pilgrim, on knight, dame and squire, or king, queen and prince; it needs no vivid imagination to call up these shades of the past. But above all and through all the pageantry of old days looms the church; Canterbury is a city of churches, of priories, monasteries, hospitals. There is St Dunstan’s, where in the Roper vault they say is the head of Sir Thomas More; St Alphege, with a curious epitaph referring to dancing in the churchyard; St Margaret’s, where sleeps Somner, antiquary and loyalist; St Peter’s, once used by a French congregation; and many another. The Black Friars, the Grey Friars, the White Friars, all had houses in Canterbury. On the banks of the river, hard by St Peter’s, the Black Friars in the reign of Henry III. founded one of their first homes, and now their ancient refectory is a Unitarian Baptist Chapel! Therein Daniel Defoe was wont

to preach. A portion of the house of the Grey Friars still stands on arches above the waters of the river; but as we look on it of no friar do we think, but of the gay cavalier, Richard Lovelace, gallant and poet, who sang—

But he wrote other and more pleasing verses, though none more curious. The Brethren of St Francis, the Franciscans or Grey Friars, came to this country in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, and their first habitation was this in Canterbury. They numbered but nine, these first comers, of whom only one was a priest, a man of Norfolk, by name Richard Ingworth. The monks of Christ Church were hospitable to them; they acquired a small piece of land and built thereon a wooden chapel. But it was felt to be incumbent on this begging fraternity not to become owners of land, so the donors of this plot handed it over to the city to be held for the friars. They did not, however, remain on their original site, but moved in 1270 to a tiny island in the Stour called Bynnewith. Henry Beale, mayor in 1478, was buried in their church. Then in bad time came Henry VIII., and the brotherhood was turned out of house and home. In the days of Good Queen Bess the house was in the possession of the Lovelaces; so here dwelt Colonel Richard, cavalier and poet, who wrote this immortal lyric:—

Then there are the East Bridge Hospital, possibly founded by Becket for “wayfaring and hurt men,” now an almshouse, and St John’s Hospital, with its charming half-timber gateway, and others. And what should such a city do without a castle? Yet the good citizens are content with a neglected ruin, the remnants of a fortress first built in the twelfth century, and full of historic memory. But castles have no living faith to keep them whole and sound; they have no usefulness, and this is a utilitarian age. Indeed, it is solely due to accident that any part of the fine old keep remains, for in the early years of last century the city fathers decided to utilise it as a quarry. But modern picks found ancient cement too strong for them, and the undertaking, not proving remunerative, was abandoned. It would have been a gross blunder to leave Canterbury unfortified, standing as it did upon the most important coast road in the kingdom. The keep was completed about 1125, and the castle further strengthened by Henry II. At one period it was the principal county prison. Here it stands amid the prosaic modernity of to-day, a hoar and unhonoured relic of the wild past.

From this desecration we turn to the leafy walks that surround the Dane John, that mysterious mound whose principal use has been to afford sport for etymological antiquaries. Donjon, we are told it may be rightly; may be also wrongly. Best had we mount the steps to the summit of the city wall, hereabouts in a wonderfully good state of preservation, and walk along it toward the cattle-market and so on to St Augustine’s College. Here we touch fingers with pagan days, for on this spot, so it is related, Ethelbert worshipped the gods of his fathers. To St Augustine he gave this temple, though such a high-sounding name misfits what was doubtless a modest erection, and it was consecrated as a Christian church in the name of St Pancras. Between it and the city rose the Benedictine monastery of St Peter and St Paul, afterward dedicated also to Augustine himself and by his name thenceforth generally known. In July 1538 came the downfall with the arrival of Henry VIII.’s commissioners; there was a demonstration of resistance on the part of the monks, but cannon provided a conclusive argument; and then the end, the glory departed. Here were buried not only Augustine, but King Ethelbert and many of the archbishops. The saint who came as an apostle of Christianity to Kent founded this great monastery; now it is a missionary college of the Church of England, whence preachers of Christ’s teaching go forth to the ends of the earth. On the saint’s tomb could once be read a brief epitome of the events of his stirring life: “Here resteth the Lord Augustine, first

Archbishop of Canterbury, who erewhile was sent hither by Blessed Gregory, Bishop of the City of Rome, and being helped by God to work miracles, drew over King Ethelbert and his race from the worship of idols to the faith of Christ. Having ended in peace the days of his ministry, he departed hence seven days before the Kalends of June in the reign of the same king, A.D. 605.”

To King Ethelbert, a heathen, and to Bertha, his queen, a Christian, came Augustine to preach the gospel; and Christian worship he found carried on by Lindhard, the queen’s French chaplain, in a small chapel standing outside the city walls, the present church of St Martin, altered in aspect, but the “mother church of England.” Through the mists of centuries we cannot clearly see; we know not how far well or ill disposed toward Christianity the King may have been; at any rate, as he permitted his queen to follow her creed, his disposition cannot have been actively evil. The King met the band of missionaries in the Isle of Thanet, promised not to molest them, and to give them all that was needed for their support, with permission to make all the converts they could. From the island Augustine and his comrades crossed to Richborough, the old Roman fortress of RutupiÆ, and so on by the Roman road toward Canterbury. On the slope of St Martin’s Hill the welcome sight of a Christian place of worship met their eyes, light amid darkness. As Augustine stood on the height, looking over the rude city on the islands of the Stour, did any prophetic vision come to him? His heart was doubtless high with hope, but he dared not have dreamed that the future was to be so glorious as we know it to have been. Then came the baptism of Ethelbert on Whitsunday in the year 597, in St Martin’s Church, and as usual, even in later days, the example of a king soon set a fashion. Of St Pancras’ Church we already know the story. Of the first cathedral in Canterbury no stone remains. When the saint died he was buried not far from the roadside, the Kent and Canterbury Hospital occupying the ground where his bones rested—until they were translated to the church of the monastery he had founded but had not lived to see completed. It is told of a stern soldier that he desired to be buried by the roadside, so that he might hear the tramp of the troops as they marched by to war; is it too far-fetched to think of the missionary Augustine lying asleep somewhere near by the college that has succeeded to his monastery, comforted by the sound of voices that like his are to preach the gospel to the heathen? Indeed, Canterbury is a city of great memories.

Augustine was, of course, the monastery’s chief treasure, and next came the body of St Mildred which was given to the house by Canute. It must never be forgotten by those who would look at things mediÆval with mediÆval eyes, that in those days the dead were more powerful than the living; even kings humbled themselves before the bones of dead saints. This relic worship became almost a madness, and the rage seized upon monks and their rulers, who stooped to the meanest thefts in order to possess themselves of such valuables. It is related that the monks of St Augustine’s Abbey offered to make Roger, the keeper of the altar of the Martyrdom, their abbot, if only he would steal for them the fragment of Becket’s skull which was entrusted to his charge. He fell to the temptation, and rose to be ruler of the rival house. For many a long year indeed St Augustine’s dominated and domineered over Christ Church; and for more than one reason. The former was an abbey, the latter but a mere priory; in the precincts of the former was buried England’s apostle Augustine, and Ethelbert, Augustine’s successor Lawrence—indeed, the first eight occupants of the archiepiscopal throne. How could a poor cathedral with never an archbishop’s bones hope to contend with such favoured rivalry? So St Cuthbert, the ninth archbishop, came to the rescue, preferring to lay his bones in his own cathedral rather than in the church of the rival establishment. He foresaw the difficulties that would arise; provided against them by procuring from the King of Kent and from the Pope an authorisation to be buried within the city walls, which he handed to the sorrowing monks as he lay adying, bidding them also to bury him first and toll the bell afterward. So it came to pass that when Abbot Aldhelm and the monks of St Augustine’s came to claim their lawful prey, they were defeated and retired in dismay. They struggled once more over the body of the succeeding Archbishop Bregwin, and then succumbed to the inevitable. The glory of the Cathedral waxed; it covered the graves of St Dunstan, St Alphege, and St Anselm; then came St Thomas and eclipse to St Augustine.

Of the church but a few fragments remain, though at the beginning of last century Ethelbert’s Tower, built about 1047, was still standing. South of the church are the remains of St Pancras’ Church, where excavations have revealed much of interest.

After the heavy hand of Henry VIII. had fallen on it, the abbey served him as a palace, afterward coming into the possession of many owners, and at length reaching a deep depth of degradation and ruin. From this it was rescued by Mr A. J. Beresford Hope in 1844, and was eventually incorporated as a college to provide “an education to qualify young men for the service of the Church in the distant dependencies of the British Empire, with such strict regard to economy and frugality of habit as may fit them for the special duties to be discharged, the difficulties to be encountered, and the hardships to be endured.” The college buildings were designed by Mr Butterfield, and opened in 1848 on St Peter’s Day. Of the old abbey, several buildings have been “worked into” the new college; one of the most important is the fourteenth century gateway, which is the main entrance, and above the archway of which is the State bedchamber, in which Elizabeth and other monarchs have rested their royal bones. The College Hall is the old Guesten Hall, and retains the ancient open-work roof.

But somehow there does not shimmer round St Augustine’s the romance of history; it is too closely in touch with to-day to allow us to dream of its yesterday. We meet no shadowy figures there of abbot or monk, of prince or soldier, hear no echoes of the clash of arms or of the voices of singers. It is as dead to us as the Cathedral and the quaint streets near by are alive.

From the city the Longport Road leads up a gentle ascent to St Martin’s. To whom this church was first dedicated is uncertain. Of the Roman building only some of the bricks remain; it was to some extent restored by the Normans, and to a great extent rebuilt in the thirteenth century.

The first feeling as we enter the churchyard and look upon this famous House of God is one of disappointment; there is something rough and homely about the clumsy walls of stones, flint, and Roman tiles, and the squat tower, creeper clad. But the associations of the little building render it lovely to us. No matter what the faith may be of him who stands in this seemly God’s-acre, he cannot but be profoundly impressed by the view as he turns first to the spot where Augustine baptised the heathen king, and then toward the soaring Cathedral tower, beneath whose shadow lie buried so many Christian kings and rulers. The very building “has had a remarkable history, surviving

disuse and decay, surviving the savage destructiveness of Jutes, the devastation of Danish invaders, the innovating rigour of Norman architects, and the apathy of succeeding centuries.” Setting our backs to the older we turn to later days and to-day, as we walk home to the city. The sun is setting; the sky panoplied in gold; lights shine out here and there from homely windows; workmen tramp to their rest; there is a gentle melancholy reigning over all things, as there ever is in ancient cities; above all broods the Cathedral, its splendid tower, steeped in the rays of the departing day, looking down as though it were no handiwork of mortal man, but some creation of Nature, immutable, inscrutable, full of majesty, of power, of everlasting dignity.