IV

At Rochester I stopped for the sake of its castle, which I espied from

the railway-train, perched on a grassy bank beside the widening Medway.

There were other reasons as well; the place has a small cathedral, and

one has read about it in Dickens, whose house of Gadshill was a couple

of miles from the town. All this Kentish country, between London and

Dover, figures indeed repeatedly in Dickens; he is to a certain extent,

for our own time, the spirit of the land. I found this to be quite the

case at Rochester. I had occasion to go into a little shop kept by a

talkative old woman who had a photograph of Gadshill lying on her

counter. This led to my asking her whether the illustrious master of the

house often made his appearance in the town "Oh, bless you, sir," she

said, "we every one of us knew him to speak to. He was in this very shop

on the Tuesday with a party of foreigners--as he was dead in his bed on

the Friday." (I should remark that I probably do not repeat the days of

the week as she gave them.) "He 'ad on his black velvet suit, and it

always made him look so 'andsome. I said to my 'usband, 'I _do_ think

Charles Dickens looks so nice in that black velvet suit.' But he said he

couldn't see as he looked any way particular. He was in this very shop

on the Tuesday, with a party of foreigners." Rochester consists of

little more than one long street, stretching away from the castle and

the river toward neighbouring Chatham, and edged with low brick houses,

of intensely provincial aspect, most of which have some small, dull

quaintness of gable or window. Nearly opposite to the shop of the old

lady with the dissentient husband is a little dwelling with an inscribed

slab set into its face, which must often have provoked a smile in the

great master of laughter. The slab relates that in the year 1579 Richard

Watts here established a charity which should furnish "six poor

travellers, not rogues or proctors," one night's lodging and

entertainment gratis, and fourpence in the morning to go on their way

withal, and that in memory of his "munificence" the stone has lately

been renewed. The inn at Rochester was poor, and I felt strongly tempted

to knock at the door of Mr. Watts's asylum, under plea of being neither

a rogue nor a proctor. The poor traveller who avails himself of the

testamentary fourpence may easily resume his journey as far as Chatham

without breaking his treasure. Is not this the place where little Davy

Copperfield slept under a cannon on his journey from London to Dover to

join his aunt, Miss Trotwood? The two towns are really but one, which

forms an interminable crooked thoroughfare, lighted up in the dusk, as I

measured it up and down, with the red coats of the vespertinal soldier

quartered at the various barracks of Chatham.

The cathedral of Rochester is small and plain, hidden away in rather an

awkward corner, without a verdant close to set it off. It is dwarfed and

effaced by the great square Norman keep of the adjacent castle. But

within it is very charming, especially beyond the detestable wall, the

vice of almost all the English cathedrals, which shuts in the choir and

breaks the sacred perspective of the aisle. Here, as at Canterbury, you

ascend a high range of steps, to pass through the small door in this

wall. When I speak slightingly, by the way, of the outside of Rochester

cathedral, I intend my faint praise in a relative sense. If we were so

happy as to possess this inferior edifice in America, we should go

barefoot to see it; but here it stands in the great shadow of

Canterbury, and that makes it humble. I remember, however, an old priory

gateway which leads you to the church, out of the main street; I

remember a kind of haunted-looking deanery, if that be the technical

name, at the base of the eastern walls; I remember a fluted tower that

took the afternoon light and let the rooks and the swallows come

circling and clamouring around it. Better than these things, however, I

remember the ivy-draped mass of the castle--a very noble and imposing

ruin. The old walled precinct has been converted into a little public

garden, with flowers and benches, and a pavilion for a band, and the

place was not empty, as such places in England never are. The result is

agreeable, but I believe the process was barbarous, involving the

destruction and dispersion of many interesting portions of the ruin. I

sat there for a long time, however, looking in the fading light at what

was left. This rugged pile of Norman masonry will be left when a great

many solid things have departed; it is a sort of satire on destruction

or decay. Its walls are fantastically thick; their great time-bleached

expanses and all their rounded roughnesses, their strange mixture of

softness and grimness, have an undefinable fascination for the eye.

English ruins always come out peculiarly when the day begins to fail.

Weather-bleached, as I say they are, they turn even paler in the

twilight and grow consciously solemn and spectral I have seen many a

mouldering castle, but I remember in no single mass of ruin more of the

helpless, amputated look.

It is not the absence of a close that damages Canterbury; the cathedral

stands amid grass and trees, with a cultivated margin all round it, and

is placed in such a way that, as you pass out from under the gatehouse,

you appreciate immediately its grand feature--its extraordinary and

magnificent length. None of the English cathedrals seems more

beautifully isolated, more shut up to itself. It is a long walk, beneath

the walls, from the gateway of the close to the farther end of the last

chapel. Of all that there is to observe in this upward-gazing stroll I

can give no detailed account; I can speak only of the general

impression. This is altogether delightful. None of the rivals of

Canterbury has a more complicated and elaborate architecture, a more

perplexing intermixture of periods, a more charming jumble of Norman

arches and English points and perpendiculars. What makes the side-view

superb, moreover, is the double transepts, which produce a fine

agglomeration of gables and buttresses. It is as if two great churches

had joined forces toward the middle--one giving its nave and the other

its choir, and each keeping its own great cross-aisles. Astride of the

roof, between them, sits a huge gothic tower, which is one of the latest

portions of the building, though it looks like one of the earliest, so

crumbled and blunted and suffused is it by time and weather, like the

rest of the structure it has a magnificent colour--a sort of rich dull

yellow, a something that is neither brown nor gray. This is particularly

appreciable from the cloisters on the farther side of the church--the

side, I mean, away from the town and the open garden-sweep I spoke of;

the side that looks toward a damp old clerical house, lurking behind a

brown archway, through which you see young ladies in Gainsborough hats

playing something on a patch of velvet turf; the side, in short, that is

somehow intermingled with a green quadrangle--a quadrangle serving as a

playground to a King's School, and adorned externally with a very

precious and picturesque old fragment of Norman staircase. This

cloisters is not "kept up;" is very dusky and mouldy and dilapidated,

and of course very sketchable. The old black arches and capitals are

various and handsome, and in the centre are tumbled together a group of

crooked grave-stones, themselves almost buried in the deep soft grass.

Out of the cloisters opens the chapter-house, which is not kept up

either, but which is none the less a magnificent structure; a noble,

lofty hall, with a beautiful wooden roof, simply arched like that of a

tunnel, without columns or brackets. The place is now given up to dust

and echoes; but it looks more like a banqueting-hall than a council-room

of priests, and as you sit on the old wooden bench, which, raised on two

or three steps, runs round the base of the four walls, you may gaze up

and make out the faint ghostly traces of decorative paint and gold upon

the brown ceiling. A little patch of this has been restored, "to give an

idea." From one of the angles of the cloisters you are recommended by

the verger to take a view of the great tower, which indeed detaches

itself with tremendous effect. You see it base itself upon the roof as

broadly as if it were striking roots in earth, and then pile itself away

to a height which seems to make the very swallows dizzy, as they drop

from the topmost shelf. Within the cathedral you hear a great deal, of

course, about poor Thomas A'Becket, and the great sensation of the place

is to stand on the particular spot where he was murdered and look down

at a small fragmentary slab which the verger points out to you as a bit

of the pavement that caught the blood-drops of the struggle. It was late

in the afternoon when I first entered the church; there had been a

service in the choir, but that was well over, and I had the place to

myself. The verger, who had some pushing-about of benches to attend to,

turned me into the locked gates and left me to wander through the

side-aisles of the choir and into the great chapel beyond it. I say I

had the place to myself; but it would be more decent to affirm that I

shared it, in particular, with another gentleman. This personage was

stretched upon a couch of stone, beneath a quaint old canopy of wood;

his hands were crossed upon his breast, and his pointed toes rested upon

a little griffin or leopard. He was a very handsome fellow and the image

of a gallant knight His name was Edward Plantagenet, and his sobriquet

was the Black Prince. "_De la mort ne pensai-je mye_," he says in the

beautiful inscription embossed upon the bronze base of his image; and I

too, as I stood there, lost the sense of death in a momentary impression

of personal nearness to him. One had been farther off, after all, from

other famous knights. In this same chapel for many a year stood the

shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, one of the richest and most potent

in Christendom. The pavement which lay before it has kept its place, but

Henry VIII. swept away everything else in his famous short cut to

reform. Becket was originally buried in the crypt of the church; his

ashes lay there for fifty years, and it was only little by little that

his martyrdom was, as the French say, "exploited." Then he was

transplanted into the Lady Chapel; every grain of his dust became a

priceless relic, and the pavement was hollowed by the knees of pilgrims.

It was on this errand of course that Chaucer's story-telling cavalcade

came to Canterbury. I made my way down into the crypt, which is a

magnificent maze of low, dark arches and pillars, and groped about till

I found the place where the frightened monks had first shuffled the

inanimate victim of Moreville and Fitzurse out of the reach of further

desecration. While I stood there a violent thunderstorm broke over the

cathedral; great rumbling gusts and rain-drifts came sweeping through

the open sides of the crypt, and, mingling with the darkness which

seemed to deepen and flash in corners, and with the potent mouldy smell,

made me feel as if I had descended into the very bowels of history. I

emerged again, but the rain had settled down and spoiled the evening,

and I splashed back to my inn and sat in an uncomfortable chair by the

coffee-room fire, reading Dean Stanley's agreeable _Memorials of

Canterbury_, and wondering over the musty appointments and meagre

resources of English hostels. This establishment had entitled itself (in

compliment to the Black Prince, I suppose) the "Fleur-de-lis" The name

was very pretty (I had been foolish enough to let it attract me to the

inn), but the lily was sadly deflowered.

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