GLASTONBURY.
About six miles south-west of Wells is the ancient Isle of Avelon, where St. Patrick is said to have spent the closing years of his life, and where are the ruins of one of the earliest and most extensive religious houses in England—Glastonbury Abbey. A sixpence is charged to visit the ruins, which adjoin the chief street, but the remnants of the vast church, that was nearly six hundred feet long, are scanty. Of the attendant buildings there only remain the abbot's kitchen and an adjoining gateway, now converted into an inn. This kitchen is about thirty-four feet square within the walls and seventy-two feet high. The church ruins include some of the walls and tower-foundations, with a well-preserved and exceedingly rich chapel dedicated to St. Joseph. On the High Street is the old George Inn, which was the hostelrie for the pilgrims, built in the reign of Edward IV. and still used. It is fronted by a splendid mass of panelling, and the central gateway has a bay-window alongside rising the entire height of the house. The church of St. John the Baptist in Glastonbury has a fine tower, elevated one hundred and forty feet and richly adorned with canopied niches, being crowned by an open-work parapet and slender pinnacles. Almost the entire town of Glastonbury is either constructed from spoils of the abbey or else is made up of parts of its buildings. One of the most characteristic of the preserved buildings is the Tribunal, now a suite of lawyers' offices. Its deeply-recessed lower windows and the oriel above have a venerable appearance, while beyond rises the tower of St. John the Baptist. Behind the town is the "Weary-all Hill," from which arose the foundation of the monastery. Tradition tells that Joseph of Arimathea, toiling up the steep ascent, drove his thorn staff into the ground and said to his followers that they would rest there. The thorn budded, and still flowers, it is said, in winter. This was regarded as an omen, and they constructed the abbey there around the chapel of St. Joseph. The ponderous abbot's kitchen, we are told, was built by the last abbot, who boasted, when Henry VIII. threatened to burn the monastery, that he would have a kitchen that all the wood in Mendip Forest could not burn down. King Arthur was buried at Glastonbury, and a veracious historian in the twelfth century wrote that he was present at the disinterment of the remains of the king and his wife. "The shin-bone of the king," he says, "when placed side by side with that of a tall man, reached three fingers above his knee, and his skull was fearfully wounded." The remains of King Arthur's wife, which were quite perfect, fell into dust upon exposure to the air.
GLASTONBURY TRIBUNAL.