with its touches of colour, and the staves that, seen from the dis- 

 tance, suggested lances, had, on that bright summer's day, sufficed 

 for one brief moment, to revivify the past, and to carry me back 

 from the twentieth century to the sixteenth. 



And so it was almost with a shock of surprise that I was roused 

 from this vision to the crude, present-day reality ; for, staring at 

 the Gatehouse, one can scarcely help living backwards, and pro- 

 jecting oneself into that bygone age to which it properly belongs, 

 for the history of England, or its side-issues, is writ all over it. 

 At the present day all sorts and conditions of men pass in and out 

 of it, as they have done for four hundred years, as they did when 

 the famous Lambeth Dole was distributed there. Watching the 

 gates, I half expected to see them open to admit one of the great 

 gilded coaches, with heavy fringed hammer-cloth, decorated panels, 

 and mighty wheels, still to be seen reposing in the seclusion of a 

 dignified old age in a corner of the Victoria and Albert Museum ; 

 or else that an Archbishop's lady, of the middle of the eighteenth 

 century, would soon be returning home from some function in the 

 fashionable west- central district, conveyed by two servitors in 

 one of those cosy carry ing- chairs on poles, then in constant use ; 

 chairs, on the embellishment of which some of the greatest French 

 pastoralists did not disdain to employ their exquisite art, and 

 which took their name from a town in France which has since 

 acquired a sinister significance, Sedan. 



But the gates rolled back and let in only the Archbishop's motor- 

 car, a characteristic product of this age of steel and petrol : next 

 came a boy on a bicycle, with a basket of loaves for His Grace's 

 household, and this was followed presently by that already unusual 

 sight in the metropolis, a hansom cab, which seemed even more 

 oddly out of keeping with the ancient pile than the auto- 

 mobile. It had here much the same incongruous effect that a 

 horse and cab, on the stage, always have. The pigeons, of which 

 there are many hundred at Lambeth Palace, clearly thought it 

 had no business there, for, though near feeding-time, they rose in 

 a fluttering cloud from the grass and stones, and, with the rushing 

 noise of wings in rapid flight, sought refuge on their favourite van- 

 tage ground, the cornices and pinnacles of the Great Hall. Yet 

 they did not disturb themselves at all when two grave dignitaries 

 of the Church, the Lord Bishop of - - and the Very Reverend 



49 4 



