as well over and I had the place to
myself. The verger, who had some pushing about of benches to attend to,
turned me into the locked gates and left me to wander through the
side-aisles of the choir and into the great chapel beyond it. I say I
had the place to myself; but it would be more decent to affirm that I
shared it, in particular, with another gentleman. This personage was
stretched upon a couch of stone, beneath a quaint old canopy of wood;
his hands were crossed upon his breast and his pointed toes rested upon
a little griffin or leopard. He was a very handsome fellow and the image
of a gallant knight. His name was Edward Plantagenet and his sobriquet
was the Black Prince. "_De la mort ne pensai-je mye_," he says in the
beautiful inscription embossed upon the bronze base of his image; and I
too, as I stood there, thought not a whit of death. His bones were in
the pavement beneath my feet, but within his rigid bronze his life
burned fresh and strong. Simple, handsome and expressive, it is a
singularly striking and even touching monument, and in the silent, empty
chapel which had held together for so many ages this last remnant of his
presence it was possible to feel a certain personal nearness to him.
One had been farther off, after all, from other examples of that British
valor of which he is the most picturesque type. In this same chapel for
many a year stood the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, one of the
richest and most potent in Christendom. The pavement which lay before it
has kept its place, but Henry VIII. swept everything else away into the
limbo of his ransacked abbeys and his murdered wives. Becket was
originally buried in the crypt of the church; his ashes lay there for
fifty years, and it was only little by little that his martyrdom was, as
the French say, "exploited." Then he was transplanted into the Lady
Chapel; every grain of his dust became a priceless relic and the
pavement was hollowed by the knees of pilgrims. It was on this errand of
course that Chaucer's story-telling cavalcade came to Canterbury. I made
my way down into the crypt, which is a magnificent maze of low, dark
arches and pillars, and groped about till I found the place where the
frightened monks had first shuffled the inanimate victim of Moreville
and Fitzurse out of the reach of further desecration. While I stood
there a violent thunder-storm broke over the cathedral; great rumbling
gusts and rain-drifts came sweeping throug