about to compass their destruction, led by another Celt, have digged a pit into which they trample headlong, and astonishing as it might seem, to the regret of that very peasantry which has hated them for so long.  At least, and let us remember this, if they were greedy and unscrupulous their vices were ours, something we could understand.  They were of our blood, we took the same things for granted, had the same prejudices, and after all the same sense of justice.  They with us were a part of Europe and looked to Rome as their ancestor and original.  But those who are about to displace them!  Alas, whence do they come who begat them, from what have they issued out?  I cannot answer; but I know that with all their faults, their sacrilege, robbery, and treason, Russell, Cavendish, Cecil and Talbot are English names, and they who bear them men of our blood, European, too, and of our civilisation.  But who are those that now begin to fill their places?  Aliens, Orientals and worse now received without surprise into the peerage of England and the great offices of justice.  And the names which recall Elizabeth and whose syllables are a part of our mother tongue, are obliterated by such jargon as these.

These are miserable thoughts to come to a man on the road to Canterbury, but they are inevitable to-day in England of my heart.  The new times belong to them.  Let us then return to the old time before them and here for the first time in sight of Canterbury let us remember St Thomas, the greatest of English Saints, the noblest English name in the Roman calendar.

All that wonder which greets you from Mad Tom’s corner upon Boughton Hill is, rightly understood, the work of St Thomas, and we might say indeed that the great Angel Steeple was the last of his miracles for it is the last of the Gothic in England, and it rose above his tomb, while that tomb was still a shrine and a monument in the hearts of men.  For “the church dedicated to St Thomas erects itself,” as Erasmus says, “with such majesty towards Heaven that even from a distance it strikes religious awe into the beholders.”

So I went on my way in the mid-afternoon down hill to what in my heart I knew to be Bob-up-and-down on the far side of which lies and climbs Harbledown and the hospital of St Nicholas.

Wite ye nat wher ther stant a litel town
Which that y-cleped is Bop-up-and-down
Under the Blee in Caunterbury weye?

This “littel town” it might seem, has disappeared, unless indeed it be Harbledown itself, which certainly bears geographically much resemblance to that descriptive name, as Erasmus describes it in his strange book.  “Know then,” says he, “that those who journey to London, not long after leaving Canterbury, find themselves in a road at once very hollow and narrow and besides the banks on either side are so steep and abrupt that you cannot escape; nor can you possibly make your journey in any other direction.  Upon the left hand of this