BY ANNA BOWMAN DODD

Such a vast architectural mass as Arundel Castle, implanted in Saxon, Roman, and feudal military necessities, strikes its roots deep and wide.  The town appeared, in comparison, to be but an accidental projection on the hillside.  The walls grow out of the town as the trunks of a great tree shoot forth from the ground—­of a different growth, but an integral part of it.

Topographically, Arundel has only a few features, yet they are fine enough to form a rich ensemble.  There is the castle, huge, splendid, impressive, set like a great gray pearl on the crown of the hill.  On one side spreads the town; on the other, the tall trees of the castle park begirt its towers and battlements.  At the foot of the hill runs the river—­a beautiful sinuous stream, which curves its course between the Down hillsides out through the plains to the sea.  Whatever may have been the fate of the town in former times, held perhaps at a distance far below in the valley, during troublous times when the castle must be free for the more serious work of assault or defense, it no longer lies at the foot of its great protector.  In friendly confidence it seems to sit, if not within its arms, at least beside its knee....

There is no escaping the conclusion that a duke, when one is confronted with his castle, does seem an awfully real being.  The castle was a great Catholic stronghold, the Dukes of Norfolk being among the few great families which have remained faithful, since the Conquest, to the See of Rome.  The present Duke of Norfolk, by reason of the fervor of his piety, his untiring zeal and magnificent generosity, is recognized as the head of the Catholic party in England.  To learn that he was at present on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, and that such was his yearly custom, seemed to shorten distance for us.  It made the old—­its beliefs, its superstitions, its unquestioning ardor of faith—­strangely new.  It invested the castle, which appealed to our consciousness as something remote and alien, with the reality of its relation to medieval life and manners.

The little cathedral which crowns the hill—­the most prominent object for miles about, after the castle—­is the gift of the present Duke.  It is a pretty structure, pointed Gothic in style, consciously reproduced with all the aids of flying buttresses, niches, pinnacles, and arches.  It was doubtless a splendid gift.  Perhaps in the twenty-first century, when the weather has done its architectural work on the exterior, and when the interior has been finely dimmed with burned incense, when stained glass and sculptured effigies of saints have been donated by future dukes, it will be a very imposing edifice indeed.

But all the beauty of ecclesiastical picturesqueness lies across the way.  Hidden behind the lovely beech-arched gateway rests the old parochial church.  In spite of restoration the age of six centuries is written unmistakably on the massive square bell-tower, the thirteenth-century traceries, and the rich old glass.  It is guarded by a high wall from the adjoining castle-walls, as if the castle still feared there were something dangerously infectious in the mere propinquity of such heresies.