1S8 THE DOVER ROAD 



ifrnorant authorities of our countr}^ towns would be 

 as ready as ever to demolish their old monuments, 

 did not their natural shrewdness teach them that, as 

 strangers come from all quarters of the world to view 

 their historical remains, they must be regarded in 

 the light of a valuable asset. So far, they are 

 undoubtedly right. Let them " restore " and tear 

 down the remaining gates and towers and castles in 

 the provincial towns of England, and they will prove, 

 in the scarcity of visitors that will follow on their 

 Vandalism, how valuable, in more senses than one, are 

 the ancient ways. 



Canterbury has seen a great deal of this senseless 

 disregard for antiquity. Six gates, as I have said, 

 were wantonly destroyed, but the passion for destruc- 

 tion did not stop here. The remains of the Norman 

 castle were years ago converted into a coal-hole of the 

 local gasAVorks, and are still put to that degradation ; 

 great stretches of the city walls, with their watch- 

 towers, were taken down for corn-mills to be built 

 with their materials ; and, worse than all, stupidity 

 of tliis kind ran riot among the Dean and Chapter in 

 the thirties. For seven hundred and fifty years had 

 Lanfranc's north-western tower of the Cathedral stood, 

 while the south-western had been rebuilt nearly three 

 hundred years before. This dissimilarity vexed those 

 assembled holders of fat prebends and decanal loaves 

 and fishes, who drank port and read The Times, and 

 had not a single sensible idea in their meagre brain- 

 pans, beyond a notion that one thing ought to match 

 with another, and that as every Jack should have his 

 Jill, so also should everything else possess a pendant. 

 How truly British ! 



Well, if these western towers did not match, they 

 must be made to ; and so to find an excuse for pulling 

 down the older one. There is always some graceless 

 modern architect, with palm itching for five-per-cent. 

 commissions, who would undertake or advise anything 

 to procure a job, and the Dean and Chapter found 



