This shrine blazed with gold and jewels until the Reformation, when it was destroyed and its treasures seized by Henry VIII.; to-day nothing of it remains.
The second greatest memory of the cathedral is that of the Black Prince; his tomb stands in the chapel where once stood the shrine of Becket. "A splendid figure of romance he was—a great fighter, and, as such, beloved of his race; the boy victor of Cressy; the conqueror at Poitiers, where the French King became his captive; in his life the glory of his country, by his untimely death leaving it to anarchy and civil war. We stand by his tomb, looking upon his effigy, which is life-like in its strength. 'There he lies: no other memorial of him exists in the world so authentic. There he lies, as he had directed, in full armour, his head resting on his helmet, his feet with the likeness of "the spurs he won" at Cressy, his hands joined as in that last prayer which he had offered up on his death-bed.' Above the canopy hang his gauntlets, his helm, his velvet coat that once blazed with the arms of England and of France, and the empty scabbard of his sword."
But when we have looked upon all the solemn beauties of the great church; when we have seen the quaintly beautiful old houses of the city about it; when we have visited St. Martin's, the oldest church in England; when we have walked round Dune John, that mysterious mound which no one can explain, still we must not leave without seeing the oldest by far of all the old things of this old city.
What is it? A small lane, no more, no less—a narrow trackway which one would pass without noticing, if he did not know it was the famous Pilgrims Way, the Old Road, the ancient trackway which ran westwards from Kent to Cornwall, and existed in days when no such names were known in the land. In the history of this lane, the name of the Pilgrims' Way is a modern title; it existed long before pilgrims were known, and it was used in the dim, far-off dawn of civilization when skin-clothed Britons carried their loads of metal eastwards to send them across the narrow seas. How old it is no man can say, but it runs along ridge and height, showing that it was marked out in times when the lower-lying country was impassable owing to marsh and woodland.
THROUGH WESSEX—I.
"Wessex?" you say. "What county is that? We know Essex and Sussex, but where is Wessex?" Well, it is not a county, and you will not find the name on a map of England; but it is a good English name for all that, and once was the name of an important English kingdom.
When Alfred the Great became King, he ruled over Wessex, the south-western part of England, and the old name still clings to the district, which is now cut up into several modern counties.
Wessex is a land of downs and dales, and broad stretches of fertile country. It is the home of the chalk hills—those great, smooth, rolling heights, covered with short, sweet grass, on which great flocks of sheep pasture and speck the vast slopes with dots of white.
"There is hardly any part of our land which has remained so little unchanged as these Downs of Wessex. It is not because they are rugged and difficult to climb: they are not; they are often easy to surmount. There are far wilder and higher looking hills in both Wales and Scotland, which have inhabitants, which are ploughed in patches and dotted with whitewashed cottages. Yet the Downs remain lonely, their sky-line unbroken by any sign of the presence of man. Just as the Roman saw them from his trireme, the Saxon from his long ship, the Dane from his war-boat, so we see them to-day—great solitary green mounds, 600, 700, 800 feet high."