with gold upon a purple ground, one of which is preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the other at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. These are probably the very gospels which once served the students of that first training school from which the seeds of Christian culture were widely diffused over England and Germany.

The object of the foundation of this building is therefore obvious; but there is another peculiarity connected with the abbey which must not be passed unnoticed. The monastery, as we have already remarked, lay close to, but just without, the city walls; and here we are again reminded of Augustine's efforts to transfer, as far as possible, the local peculiarities of his former residence in Rome to his new home. Like the Dorians and Ionians, who carried the names of their cities into Pontus, to Sicily, and to every other region which they colonized; like the Spaniards, who transferred the names of their provinces and chief towns to Central America ; or, like the English, who have perpetuated the designations of their counties and episcopal sees in the northern parts of the Western Continent; St. Augustine strove, in his day, to reproduce in the remote scenes of his Christian mission the names and characteristics of the home from which he and his companions had come. We know that, at that period, no interment had as yet been allowed within the walls of Rome, and that cemeteries were outside the city along the sides of the great highways, by which it was approached from every direction. Augustine found that there was an old paved Roman road which ran from Canterbury to Deal, and by which he had himself come on his first arrival. Here he de

termined to fix his burial-place, in close proximity to the ecclesiastical institution which was destined to give direct vitality to the diffusion of Christianity in England.

The spot in which lie buried the remains of the first primate of England and the first Christian English king, served as a direct memorial of the Appian Way, as the church of St. Pancras was intended to remind the fartravelled monks of the Cœlian Mount and their distant homes. Such associations as these are frequently met with in the history of St. Augustine: thus the cathedral of the see of Rochester was dedicated to St. Andrew, and the great Christian church in London to the Apostle Paul; while the abbey at Westminster, which had been erected on a spot at which Christians had worshipped and pagan Saxons had offered up their sacrifices, perpetuated the name of the apostle St. Peter.

Augustine died on the 26th of May, 605, with the joint titles of abbot and archbishop, and when he had in person accomplished the principal objects of his mission. His abbey continued to stand until the sixteenth century, when, under Henry VIII., all the monastic institutions of England were destroyed. In the middle ages, after a special and more richly endowed monastery had been associated with the cathedral, St. Augustine's Abbey became embroiled in many odious contests, such as are of too frequent occurrence in the history of monastic institutions. The only authenticated remains of this once vast edifice is a noble gateway belonging to the fifteenth century, together with two beautifully ornamented and well-preserved turrets. We must not pass unnoticed the fact that, behind this gate, which now

again serves as a principal entrance, and on the site of the old abbey, there stands a capacious building in the old Gothic style, in which, with its hall and chapel, the national Church of England provides for the training of her missionaries, who are destined to be sent forth to every part of the world. At the same spot from whence the first Christian teachers of the Frisians and the continental Saxons set forth on their mission of conversion, Negroes, Hindoos, and Polynesians, now receive the instruction and ordination necessary to fit them for carrying the knowledge of the Cross to all zones and to all the nations of the earth. Here, then, we have a verification of the words used by King Alfred, the West Saxon, when he says of St. Augustine, "Pope Gregory, the champion of the Lord, sent him forth to carry the glad tidings of the Gospel over the salt waves of the sea to those who dwell in the islands."

To a later age, and to a very different sphere of ideas, belongs another person, whose memory will never be severed from Canterbury, notwithstanding the changes which time has wrought and still may bring with it. The associations to which we refer are especially connected with the cathedral, of which, as we have already mentioned, Augustine laid the foundation. We know but little of the history of the original building, but it is certain that, in the eighth century, there arose in connexion with it a Benedictine monastery, which speedily contrived to wrest from the canons and from the members of St. Augustine's Abbey, who were not a little tenacious of their exceptional position, the rights which they had hitherto enjoyed, and which soon began, in opposition to the suffragans of the province, to act as the

chapter for the diocese of the metropolitan see of the island. This new brotherhood even contrived nefariously to deprive their neighbours of Augustine's remains, in order that they might, on the ground of possessing these precious relics, maintain the pre-eminence and authority which they had assumed. This, and many similar questions, maintained the bitterest dissensions for several centuries between these rival institutions.

The ancient cathedral disappeared towards the close of the Saxon period. Lanfranc, the great scholastic primate under William the Conqueror, began the colossal edifice whose foundation walls remain, for the most part, uninjured to the present day; and although a destructive fire, which occurred in the year 1174, consumed the roof and arches, we still meet with undoubted traces of the best Norman style of architecture in the elegant columns of the stairs on the north side, and in the magnificent crypt. The plan of the building, as we now see it, and the commencement of its execution, are therefore due to the great Archbishop Stephen Langton, who lived in the first half of the thirteenth century, and to whose energetic character England, and the world at large, are indebted for the Magna Charta. The primate's sarcophagus is on the south side of the building, where it projects through the wall far out into the churchyard, as if the dead had belonged not wholly to the Church, but more than half to the world. The execution of this great work was furthered by an occurrence which threw far into the shade all other events connected with Canterbury, with the exception, perhaps, of Ethelbert's conversion, and was the occasion of giving to the cathedral a monument which, although it did not, perhaps, cause

those of Lanfranc, Anselm, Stephen Langton, and many other celebrated men, to be wholly forgotten, yet led them, for many centuries, to be comparatively neglected. This monument was the shrine of Archbishop Thomas Becket, erected after he had attained to the character of a martyr and a national saint.

It would carry us too far beyond our limits were we here to repeat the often-told tale of this remarkable man's life, or were we even to enter into a discussion of the conflict in which he was so long engaged. But it is decidedly not out of place for us again to remonstrate against the widely diffused error, which is mainly due to Thierry, and according to which Becket is to be regarded as a representative of the Saxo-Germanic element, in opposition to the Plantagenet King, Henry II., who appears before us as the impersonation of the spirit of Romanism. Now, if we adhere to purely national and historical points of view, we cannot fail to see that such a hypothesis is the very opposite to the truth. There is no Church quarrel in that century regarding the details and agents of which we have such authentic records. There are probably a thousand genuine letters extant from the different persons who took part in these transactions, and we have at least twenty descriptions of Becket's life and passion, which were written within the first fifty years after the martyrdom. It was not long before the credulous generation of those days had learned to look almost blasphemously upon the four most distinguished of these writers, who had all been eye-witnesses of the scenes they recorded, as the evangelists of this new Saviour; while their narratives, which were copiously interlarded with tales of miracles, were collected in the