These old cathedrals are beyond all comparison what are best worth seeing, of a man’s handiwork, in Europe.  How great the delight to be able to bring them, bodily, as it were, to our own firesides!  A hundred thousand pilgrims a year used to visit Canterbury.  Now Canterbury visits us.  See that small white mark on the pavement.  That marks the place where the slice of Thomas a Becket’s skull fell when Reginald Fitz Urse struck it off with a “Ha!” that seems to echo yet through the vaulted arches.  And see the broad stains, worn by the pilgrims’ knees as they climbed to the martyr’s shrine.  For four hundred years this stream of worshippers was wearing itself into these stones.  But there was the place where they knelt before the altar called “Beckets’s Crown.”  No! the story that those deep hollows in the marble were made by the pilgrims’ knees is too much to believe,—­but there are the hollows, and that is the story.

And now, if you would see a perfect gem of the art of photography, and at the same time an unquestioned monument of antiquity which no person can behold without interest, look upon this,—­the monument of the Black Prince.  There is hardly a better piece of work to be found.  His marble effigy lies within a railing, with a sounding board.  Above this, on a beam stretched between two pillars, hang the arms he wore at the Battle of Poitiers,—­the tabard, the shield, the helmet, the gauntlets, and the sheath that held his sword, which weapon it is said that Cromwell carried off.  The outside casing of the shield has broken away, as you observe, but the lions or lizards, or whatever they were meant for, and the flower-de-laces or plumes may still be seen.  The metallic scales, if such they were, have partially fallen from the tabard, or frock, and the leather shows bare in parts of it.

Here, hard by, is the sarcophagus of Henry IV. and his queen, also inclosed with a railing like the other.  It was opened about thirty years ago, in presence of the dean of the cathedral.  There was a doubt, so it was said, as to the monarch’s body having been really buried there.  Curiosity had nothing to do with it, it is to be presumed.  Every over-ground sarcophagus is opened sooner or later, as a matter of course.  It was hard work to get it open; it had to be sawed.  They found a quantity of hay,—­fresh herbage, perhaps, when it was laid upon the royal body four hundred years ago,—­and a cross of twigs.  A silken mask was on the face.  They raised it and saw his red beard, his features well preserved, a gap in the front-teeth, which there was probably no court-dentist to supply,—­the same the citizens looked on four centuries ago

  “In London streets that coronation-day,
  When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary”;

then they covered it up to take another nap of a few centuries, until another dean has an historical doubt,—­at last, perhaps, to be transported by some future Australian Barnum to the Sidney Museum and exhibited as the mummy of one of English Pharaohs.  Look, too, at the “Warriors’ Chapel,” in the same cathedral.  It is a very beautiful stereograph, and may be studied for a long time, for it is full of the most curious monuments.