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 folk, who do not live within its walls, while a very meagre wayfarer’s dole is still distributed to all who pass by so far as a horn of beer and two loaves of bread will go.  Each of the Brethren of St Cross beside a little house and maintenance receives five shillings a week.

All this sounds, if you be poor, too good to be true.  It is too good to owe its origin to the modern world, but not extraordinary for the Middle Age, which was eagerly and even violently Christian.  And just as the institution seems in itself wonderful to us in our day, so do the buildings, which, if one would really understand how gloriously strange they are, should be carefully compared with the county workhouse.

One enters the Hospital by a gate, and, passing through a small court, comes to the great gatehouse of Cardinal Beaufort, consisting of gateway, porter’s lodge and great square tower.  Here and there we still see Cardinal Beaufort’s arms and devices, while over the gate itself are three niches, in one of which a kneeling figure of the Cardinal remains.  Within this gatehouse is a large quadrangle, about three sides of which the hospital is set with the church upon the south, between which and the gatehouse runs a sixteenth century cloister.  The whole is wonderfully quiet and peaceful, a corner of that old England, England of my heart, which is so fast vanishing away.

The noblest building of this most noble place, and the only one now left to us which dates from its foundation by Bishop Henry of Blois is the church.  This is a great Transitional building, one of the finest examples of that style in England, and dates from about 1160 to 1292.  It is a cruciform building with central tower, the nave and chancel being aisled, the transepts, aisles and all, vaulted in stone in the fourteenth century.  The earliest part of the church is the chancel, which has a square eastern end, and the lower parts of the transepts probably date from the same time.  These transepts were finished a little later, when the nave was begun and finished, and the north porch built in the thirteenth century.  The clerestory of the nave dates from the first half of the fourteenth century, and so does the great western window.  Much of the furniture of the church is interesting, such as the fourteenth century tiles, the curious Norman bowl that does duty as a font, the fourteenth century glass in the clerestory window of the nave, and that, little though it be,