“learn’d and fair and good”

enough to stir the soul of stalwart Ben Jonson, and the names of Sidney and Herbert make us forget the strange hyperboles.

History meets us everywhere, as we stray among these ancient monuments.  Under that effigy lie the great bones of Sir John Cheyne, a mighty man of war, said to have been “overthrown” by Richard the Third at the battle of Bosworth Field.  What was left of him was unearthed in 1789 in the demolition of the Beauchamp chapel, and his thigh-bone was found to be four inches longer than that of a man of common stature.

The reader may remember how my recollections started from their hiding-place when I came, in one of our excursions, upon the name of Lechmere, as belonging to the owner of a fine estate by or through which we were driving.  I had a similar twinge of reminiscence at meeting with the name of Gorges, which is perpetuated by a stately monument at the end of the north aisle of the cathedral.  Sir Thomas Gorges, Knight of Longford Castle, may or may not have been of the same family as the well-remembered grandiose personage of the New England Pilgrim period.  The title this gentleman bore had a far more magnificent sound than those of his contemporaries, Governor Carver and Elder Brewster.  No title ever borne among us has filled the mouth quite so full as that of “Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Lord Palatine of the Province of Maine,” a province with “Gorgeana” (late the plantation of Agamenticus) as its capital.  Everywhere in England a New Englander is constantly meeting with names of families and places which remind him that he comes of a graft from an old tree on a new stock.  I could not keep down the associations called up by the name of Gorges.  There is a certain pleasure in now and then sprinkling our prosaic colonial history with the holy water of a high-sounding title; not that a “Sir” before a man’s name makes him any better,—­for are we not all equal, and more than equal, to each other?—­but it sounds pleasantly.  Sir Harry Vane and Sir Harry Frankland look prettily on the printed page, as the illuminated capital at the head of a chapter in an old folio pleases the eye of the reader.  Sir Thomas Gorges was the builder of Longford Castle, now the seat of the Earl of Radnor, whose family name is Bouverie.  Whether our Sir Ferdinando was of the Longford Castle stock or not I must leave to my associates of the Massachusetts Historical Society to determine.

We lived very quietly at our temporary home in Salisbury Close.  A pleasant dinner with the Dean, a stroll through the grounds of the episcopal palace, with that perpetual feast of the eyes which the cathedral offered us, made our residence delightful at the time, and keeps it so in remembrance.  Besides the cathedral there were the very lovely cloisters, the noble chapter-house with its central pillar,—­this structure has been restored and rejuvenated since my earlier visit,—­and there were the peaceful dwellings,