guardian angels; there have looked out at us old Mr Wickfield and young David, Miss Betsy Trotwood and Mr Dick—all very much alive. Then it is delightful on a frosty morning to see Doctor Strong bestowing his gaiters “on a beggar-woman, who occasioned some scandal in the neighbourhood by exhibiting a fine infant from door to door, wrapped in those garments, which were universally recognised, being as well known in the vicinity as the Cathedral.” But who would wish to meet the Old Soldier? And was it not Mr Micawber who came to “see the Cathedral. Firstly, on account of its being so well worth seeing.... And secondly, on account of the great probability of something turning up in a cathedral town”? Then we may sit, if we list, with little David in the Cathedral any Sunday morning, the sunless air, the sensation of the world being shut out, the resounding of the organ through the black-and-white arched galleries and aisles affecting us as they did him, being as wings that take us back to childish days.
A giant of a man meets us in these city streets, a long-legged, white-haired, bespectacled man, one who signed a letter “W. M. T.,” in which he wrote: “I passed an hour in the Cathedral, which seemed all beautiful to me; the fifteenth century part, the thirteenth century part, and the crypt above all, which they say is older than the Conquest.... Fancy the church quite full; the altar lined with pontifical gentlemen bobbing up and down; the dear little boys in white and red flinging about the incense pots; the music roaring out from the organs; all the monks and the clergy in their stalls, and the archbishop on his throne—oh, how fine! And then think of the ✠ of our Lord speaking quite simply to simple Syrian people, a child or two maybe at his knees, as he taught them that love was the truth.” Thus spake Thackeray the cynic.
In the days of Elizabeth—to be exact, in the year 1561, on May 22nd—John Marlowe was married to Catherine Arthur in the church of St George the Martyr, the said John being a man of some standing and a member later of the Guild of Shoemakers and Tanners. Then in the same church, in the year 1564, on February 26th was christened Christopher, the eldest son of the above. The boy when fourteen years of age won a scholarship in the King’s School, of which the master then was Nicholas Goldsborough. When Kit left the school we know not; he went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; he went to London; he wrote Faustus, Tamburlaine the Great, The Rich Jew of Malta, Edward II., Hero and Leander; sang
“Come live with me and be my love.”
And there is a foolish monument to him, where once stood the butter-market, outside Christ Church gate. Of the man’s manner and appearance we know not anything; his works live, but the man is dead even to our mind’s eye. Yet there are some of us who would rather meet his shadow here than even those of Chaucer and of Dickens; perchance because we know him not.