We were later astonished to learn that the archbishop’s salary amounts to $75,000 per year, or half as much more than that of the President of the United States, and we were still more surprised to hear that the heavy demands made on him in maintaining his state and keeping up his splendid episcopal palaces are such that his income will not meet them.  We were told that the same situation prevails everywhere with these high church dignitaries, and that only recently the Bishop of London had published figures to show that he was $25,000 poorer in the three years of his incumbency on an annual salary of $40,000 per year.  It is not strange, therefore, that among these churchmen there exists a demand for a simpler life.  The Bishop of Norwich frankly acknowledged recently that he had never been able to live on his income of $22,500 per year.  He expressed his conviction that the wide-spread poverty of the bishops is caused by their being required to maintain “venerable but costly palaces.”  He says that he and many of his fellow-churchmen would prefer to lead plain and unostentatious lives, but they are not allowed to do so; that they would much prefer to devote a portion of their income to charity and other worthy purposes rather than to be compelled to spend it in useless pomp and ceremony.

Aside from its cathedral, Canterbury teems with unique relics of the past, some antedating the Roman invasion of England.  The place of the town in history is an important one, and Dean Stanley in his “Memorials of Canterbury,” claims that three great landings were made in Kent adjacent to the city, “that of Hengist and Horsa, which gave us our English forefathers and character; that of Julius Caesar, which revealed to us the civilized world, and that of St. Augustine, which gave us our Latin Christianity.”  The tower of the cathedral dominates the whole city and the great church often overshadows everything else in interest to the visitor.  But one could spend days in the old-world streets, continually coming across fine half-timbered houses, with weather-beaten gables in subdued colors and rich antique oak carvings.  There are few more pleasing bits of masonry in Britain than the great cathedral gateway at the foot of Mercery Lane, with its rich carving, weather-worn to a soft blur of gray and brown tones.  Near Mercery Lane, too, are slight remains of the inn of Chaucer’s Tales, “The Chequers of Hope,” and in Monastery Street stands the fine gateway of the once rich and powerful St. Augustine’s Abbey.  Then there is the quaint little church of St. Martins, undoubtedly one of the oldest in England, and generally reputed to be the oldest.  Here, in the year 600, St. Augustine preached before the cathedral was built.  Neither should St. John’s hospital, with its fine, half-timbered gateway be forgotten; nor the old grammar school, founded in the Seventh Century.

[Illustration:  Cathedral, Canterbury.]