this point, and then turns at an acute angle
towards the south side of the Cathedral. Following the direction Queen
Bertha would have taken brings one to the great gateway of St.
Augustine's Abbey, the Benedictine monastery founded by Augustine on
the land given for that purpose by Ethelbert. It was at first
dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, and the original buildings were
finished in 613. Having become the place of burial for the Kings of
Kent and the Archbishops, the Abbey quite overshadowed the Priory of
Christ Church, until in 758 Archbishop Cuthbert was secretly buried
within the claustral confines of his own priory. At the Dissolution
Henry converted the stately buildings into a palace, so that the royal
visits, which had been of no infrequent occurrence in the days of
monastic hospitality, continued; and while the lordly pile passed
through the hands of various owners, Elizabeth, Charles I., and
Charles II. paid visits on various occasions.

A century ago, when appreciation of the architecture of the dead
centuries when Englishmen built with superlative skill had ebbed to
its lowest, the Abbey had sunk to inconceivably debased uses. The
monastic kitchen had been converted into a public-house, and the great
gateway--the finest structural relic of the Abbey--had become the
entrance to a brewery, while cock-fighting took place in the state
bedroom above. The pilgrims' guest hall, now the college dining-hall,
had become a dancing-hall, and the ground, unoccupied by buildings,
soil hallowed by the memories of so many saintly lives and associated
with the momentous days when England was being released from the toils
of pagan ignorance became known as "the Old Palace Tea-gardens." The
popular mind had seemingly forgotten the original uses of the place
they were desecrating with fireworks and variety shows.

At last, in 1844, Mr. Beresford Hope rescued the half-destroyed
remnants of the abbey-palace, and through his generosity the present
missionary college was founded, and the buildings restored or
reconstructed. A more happy idea could scarcely have been suggested
than that of associating the abbey founded by the first missionary of
Christianity to England with modern efforts to carry the light into
the dark places of the earth. The much-restored gateway, built by
Abbot Fyndon at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the
guest-hall, and part of the memorial chapel, are the chief portions of
the old structures