19i THE DOVER ROAD 



judged from tliis portraiture of him, whieh shows a 

 wistful-looking, hollow-cheeked elderly man, with nose 

 and chin and eyes unnaturally prominent. The carica- 

 turists took a mean advantage of his phenomenal 

 leanness, and called him the " Duke of Barebones," 

 and a Court witling made the cruel jest that " the 

 French had sent over the preliminaries of an 

 ambassador to conclude the preliminaries of a peace." 

 He eventually did conclude a peace, and, returning 

 to Dover, left (how thankfully !) for France on May 22, 

 1763. Let us hope that, after all his trials with the 

 English hotel-keepers and the English climate, he 

 experienced a better passage across the Channel than 

 when he first crossed it. 



XXXV 



Not all visitors to Canterbury were so evilly entreated 

 as the Due de Ni\"ernais. Indeed, the city has been 

 remarkable rather for its lavish and abounding 

 hospitality than for any attempted over-reaching of the 

 stranger. But since those strangers were chiefly 

 Kings and Emperors, and great personages of that kind, 

 perhaps it is little to be wondered at that the citizens, 

 to say nothing of those greedy time-servers, the Priors 

 and monks of Christ Church Priory and the Priory of 

 Saint Augustine, rendered to those great ones of the 

 earth the most abject suit and service. Almost every 

 English sovereign has been here at some time or 

 another, and many a foreign potentate besides. 

 Henry the Second, it is true, walked into the city, 

 barefoot, from Harbledown, and so to the Cathedral, 

 doing abject penance for the murder of Becket, four 

 years previously, and it seems to be equally true that 

 as he proceeded to Becket's shrine he was scourged by 

 the monks on his bare back and shoulders with knotted 

 cords ; but I think they would have laid on harder and 

 with a better will had the penitent not been of so 



