the night after his severe penance. This very short description of
such a building must be regarded as a mere introduction to the study
of a vast subject, for in the space available nothing more is remotely
possible.




CHAPTER IV

THE CITY


A walled city generally holds more easily that elusive quality of
romance for which the intelligent mind so often hungers than a town
that has long ago discarded its old tower-studded girdle. And among
the half-dozen or more English towns still possessed of their old
mural defences Canterbury holds a high place, because within its walls
there are still, in spite of railways and motors and the horrors of
twentieth-century advertising, a hundred byways and nooks where the
atmosphere of Elizabethan and pre-Reformation England still lurks. The
wall itself does not stand out with the splendid completeness of York
or Conway, and on the western side it has vanished altogether, while
of the seven or eight gates, one only--the West Gate--has been saved;
yet, while walking in the narrow, picturesque streets, it is difficult
to forget that Canterbury is a walled city. Until well into last
century all the gates were standing; but one by one these ornaments
were destroyed by the city until one only was left, and even that
would have been wantonly sacrificed to facilitate the entry of some
circus caravans when, in 1850, Wombwell's menagerie visited the city!