A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY
One of the most impressive spots on earth, and one that especially
teaches--with silent, pathetic eloquence and solemn admonition--the
great lesson of contrast, the incessant flow of the ages and the
inevitable decay and oblivion of the past, is the ancient city of
Canterbury. Years and not merely days of residence there are essential
to the adequate and right comprehension of that wonderful place. Yet
even an hour passed among its shrines will teach you, as no printed word
has ever taught, the measureless power and the sublime beauty of a
perfect religious faith; while, as you stand and meditate in the shadow
of the gray cathedral walls, the pageant of a thousand years of history
will pass before you like a dream. The city itself, with its bright,
swift river (the Stour), its opulence of trees and flowers, its narrow
winding streets, its numerous antique buildings, its many towers, its
fragments of ancient wall and gate, its formal decorations, its air of
perfect cleanliness and thoughtful gravity, its beautiful, umbrageous
suburbs,--where the scarlet of the poppies and the russet red of the
clover make one vast rolling sea of colour and of fragrant
delight,--and, to crown all, its stately character of wealth without
ostentation and industry without tumult, must prove to you a deep and
satisfying comfort. But, through all this, pervading and surmounting it
all, the spirit of the place pours in upon your heart, and floods your
whole being with the incense and organ music of passionate, jubilant
devotion.
Illustration: "Falstaff Inn and West Gate, Canterbury."
It was not superstition that reared those gorgeous fanes of worship
which still adorn, even while they no longer consecrate, the
ecclesiastic cities of the old world. In the age of Augustine, Dunstan,
and Ethelnoth humanity had begun to feel its profound and vital need of
a sure and settled reliance on religious faith. The drifting spirit,
worn with sorrow, doubt, and self-conflict, longed to be at
peace--longed for a refuge equally from the evils and tortures of its
own condition and the storms and perils of the world. In that longing it
recognised its immortality and heard the voice of its Divine Parent; and
out of the ecstatic joy and utter abandonment of its new-born,
passionate, responsive faith, it built and consecrated those stupendous
temples,--rearing them with all its love no less than all its riches and
all its power. There was no wealth that it would not give, no toil that
it would not perform, and no sacrifice that it would not make, in the
accomplishment of its sacred task. It was grandly, nobly, terribly in
earnest, and it achieved a work that is not only sublime in its poetic
majesty but measureless in the scope and extent of its moral and
spiritual influence. It has left to succeeding ages not only a legacy of
permanent beauty, not only a sublime symbol of religious faith, but an
everlasting monument to the loveliness and greatness that are inherent
in human nature. No creature with a human heart in his bosom can stand
in such a building as Canterbury cathedral without feeling a greater
love and reverence than he ever felt before, alike for God and man.
Illustration: "Butchery Lane, Canterbury."
On a day (July 27, 1882) when a class of the boys of the King's School
of Canterbury was graduated the present writer chanced to be a listener
to the impressive and touching sermon that was preached before them, in
the cathedral; wherein they were tenderly admonished to keep unbroken
their associations with their school-days and to remember the lessons of
the place itself. That counsel must have sunk deep into every mind. It
is difficult to understand how any person reared amid such scenes and
relics could ever cast away their hallowing influence. Even to the
casual visitor the bare thought of the historic treasures that are
garnered in this temple is, by itself, sufficient to implant in the
bosom a memorable and lasting awe. For more than twelve hundred years
the succession of the Archbishops of Canterbury has remained
substantially unbroken. There have been ninety-three "primates of all
England," of whom fifty-three were buried in the cathedral, and here the
tombs of fifteen of them are still visible. Here was buried the
sagacious, crafty, inflexible, indomitable Henry the Fourth,--that
Hereford whom Shakespeare has described and interpreted with matchless,
immortal eloquence,--and here, cut off in the morning of his greatness,
and lamented to this day in the hearts of the English people, was laid
the body of Edward the Black Prince, who to a dauntless valour and
terrible prowess in war added a high-souled, human, and tender
magnanimity in conquest, and whom personal virtues and shining public
deeds united to make the ideal hero of chivalry. In no other way than by
personal observance of such memorials can historic reading be invested
with a perfect and permanent reality. Over the tomb of the Black Prince,
with its fine recumbent effigy of gilded brass, hang the gauntlets that
he wore; and they tell you that his sword formerly hung there, but that
Oliver Cromwell--who revealed his iconoclastic and unlovely character in
making a stable of this cathedral--carried it away. Close at hand is the
tomb of the wise, just, and gentle Cardinal Pole, simply inscribed
"Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord"; and you may touch a
little, low mausoleum of gray stone, in which are the ashes of John
Morton, that Bishop of Ely from whose garden in Holborn the strawberries
were brought for the Duke of Gloster, on the day when he condemned the
accomplished Hastings, and who "fled to Richmond," in good time, from
the standard of the dangerous Protector. Standing there, I could almost
hear the resolute, scornful voice of Richard, breathing out, in clear,
implacable accents--
"Ely with Richmond troubles me more near
Than Buckingham and his rash-levied strength."
The astute Morton, when Bosworth was over and Richmond had assumed the
crown and Bourchier had died, was made Archbishop of Canterbury; and as
such, at a great age, he passed away.
Illustration: "Flying Horse Inn, Canterbury."
A few hundred yards from his place of rest, in a vault beneath the
Church of St. Dunstan, is the head of Sir Thomas More (the body being in
St. Peter's, at the Tower of London), who in his youth had been a member
of Morton's ecclesiastical household, and whose greatness that prelate
had foreseen and prophesied. Did no shadow of the scaffold ever fall
across the statesman's thoughts, as he looked upon that handsome, manly
boy, and thought of the troublous times that were raging about them?
Morton, aged ninety, died in 1500; More, aged fifty-five, in 1535.
Strange fate, indeed, was that, and as inscrutable as mournful, which
gave to those who in life had been like father and son such a ghastly
association in death![1] They show you the place where Becket was
murdered, and the stone steps, worn hollow by the thousands upon
thousands of devout pilgrims who, in the days before the Reformation,
crept up to weep and pray at the costly, resplendent shrine of St.
Thomas. The bones of Becket, as all the world knows, were, by command of
Henry the Eighth, burnt, and scattered to the winds, while his shrine
was pillaged and destroyed. Neither tomb nor scutcheon commemorates him
here,--but the cathedral itself is his monument.
[1] St. Dunstan's church was connected with the Convent of St. Gregory.
The Roper family, in the time of Henry the Fourth, founded a chapel in
it, in which are two marble tombs, commemorative of them, and underneath
which is their burial vault. Margaret Roper, Sir Thomas More's daughter,
obtained her father's head, after his execution, and buried it here. The
vault was opened in 1835,--when a new pavement was laid in the chancel
of this church,--and persons descending into it saw the head, in a
leaden box shaped like a beehive, open in front, set in a niche in the
wall, behind an iron grill.
Illustration: "Canterbury Cathedral."
There it stands, with its grand columns and glorious arches, its towers
of enormous size and its long vistas of distance, so mysterious and
awful, its gloomy crypt where once the silver lamps sparkled and the
smoking censers were swung, its tombs of mighty warriors and statesmen,
its frayed and crumbling banners, and the eternal, majestic silence with
which it broods over the love, ambition, glory, defeat, and anguish of a
thousand years, dissolved now and ended in a little dust! As the organ
music died away I looked upward and saw where a bird was wildly flying
to and fro, through the vast spaces beneath its lofty roof, in the vain
effort to find some outlet of escape. Fit emblem, truly, of the human
mind which strives to comprehend and to utter the meaning of this
marvellous fabric!
Illustration: "Alladin's Lamp"