ation for me. I feel there, it is
true, that I am in a world different from that in which we do so well
to rejoice, but such is my perversity I cannot help preferring the old
to the new. This is a mere prejudice, quite personal to myself, and
comes perhaps of being a Christian. When I look at St Cross I am
vividly reminded that this was once a Christian country with a
Christian civilisation; when I look at one of our great workhouses I
know that all that has passed away and that we have "progressed" so
fast and so far that Christianity has been left some four hundred years
behind us. St Cross is, as it were, a rock of the old Christian time
still emerging from the grey sea of the modern world.

Bishop Henry de Blois intended, as I have said, to provide, by the
foundation of the Hospital of St Cross, for the maintenance of thirteen
poor men and the relief of an hundred others. His design was perverted
in the thirteenth century, but gloriously restored by the founder of
Winchester College and his successor in the Bishopric, Cardinal
Beaufort, who added to the original foundation the almshouse of Noble
Poverty, in which he hoped to support thirty-five brethren with two
priests and three nuns to minister to the inmates. The hospital, by the
merest good fortune, escaped suppression at the Reformation, but during
most of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and through
many years of the nineteenth its revenues were enjoyed by men
who, as often as not, had never seen the place, and so the poor
were robbed. Perhaps the most insolent abuse of the kind occurred
between 1808 and 1815. In the former year Bishop Brownlow North,
of Winchester, appointed his son Francis, later Earl of Guildford,
to be master. This man appropriated the revenues of the place
to the tune of fourteen hundred pounds a year, and when at last
the scandal was exposed, it was discovered that between 1818 and 1838
he had taken not less than fifty-three thousand pounds in fines on
renewing leases, a manifest and probably wilful breach of trust, that
ought, one may think, to have brought him to the Old Bailey. The
exposure of this rascal led to a reformation of the administration,
which is now in the hands of trustees who elect thirteen brethren
provided for by Bishop Henry of Blois. These wear a black gown with a
silver cross. St Cross also still maintains certain brethren of Noble
Poverty, and these wear a red gown, and not less than fifty poor