any doubt of the deadly earnestness of the struggle that
lay before her. Archbishop Chichele's accession to the primacy was the
signal for the building of Lollards' Tower. Dr. Maitland has shown that
the common name rests on a mere error, and that the Lollards' Tower
which meets us so grimly in the pages of Foxe was really a western tower
of St. Paul's. But, as in so many other instances, the popular voice
showed a singular historical tact in its mistake; the tower which
Chichele raised marked more than any other in the very date of its
erection the new age of persecution on which England was to enter. From
a gateway in the northern side of the Post-room worn stone steps lead up
to a dungeon in which many a prisoner for the faith must have lain. The
massive oaken door, the iron rings bolted into the wall, the one narrow
window looking out over the river, tell their tale as well as the broken
sentences scratched or carved around. Some are mere names; here and
there some light-pated youngster paying for his night's uproar has
carved his dice or his "Jesus kep me out of all il compane, Amen." But
"Jesus est amor meus" is sacred, whether Lollard or Jesuit graved it in
the lonely prison hours, and not less sacred the "Deo sit gratiarum
actio" that marks perhaps the leap of a martyr's heart at the news of
the near advent of his fiery deliverance. It is strange to think, as one
winds once more down the stairs that such feet have trodden, how soon
England answered to the challenge that Lollards' Tower flung out over
the Thames. The white masonry had hardly grown grey under the buffetings
of a hundred years ere Lollard was no longer a word of shame, and the
reformation that Wyclif had begun sat enthroned within the walls of the
chapel where he had battled for his life.

The attitude of the primates indeed showed that sooner or later such a
reformation was inevitable. From the moment when Wyclif stood in
Lambeth Chapel the Church sank ecclesiastically as well as politically
into non-existence. It survived merely as a vast landowner, whilst its
primates, after a short effort to resume their older position as real
heads of their order, dwindled into ministers and tools of the Crown.
The Gate-tower of the house, the grand mass of brickwork, whose dark red
tones are (or, alas! were till a year or two since) so exquisitely
brought out by the grey stone of its angles and the mullions of its
broad arch-window, recalls an age--that of its