324 [Proc. B.N.F.C, 



" HALF AN HOUR IN CANTERBURY." 



At the Wednesday evening meeting on 1st February 

 the President (Mr. W. J. Fennell) read a paper entitled 

 '' Half an Hour in Canterbury," in which he described 

 the pilgrimages to the famous shrine of Thomas a Becket, 

 and briefly sketched the history of the church, which, 

 with the single exception of Westminster, is more bound up 

 in the history of England than any other cathedral. The life 

 story of such a building must naturally contain many chap- 

 ters of stirring events, and the mere mention of many of them 

 brings vividly before one the great events of the building up 

 of the nation. Alongside of this ran the progress of English 

 art, as revealed in the Gothic stone, which bears a silent, but 

 powerful testimony to the character of the men whose lives 

 were concurrent with it. In little over " half an hour " Mr. 

 Fennell took his audience round the grand old church, then 

 through it, calling attention to the various styles of each well- 

 marked age or period of its long lifetime. He pointed out 

 the majesty of stupendous masses controlled by proportion 

 and disposition, aided and dignified by appropriate ornament. 

 He also called attention to the grotesque, and said that if the 

 old monks were like other people and loved a witty jest, and 

 even went so far as to carve it in stone as being too good to lose, 

 they also had a serious side, which rose to the epic grandeur of 

 spiritual power when it stood between the oppressor and the 

 oppressed, with the command, " Stand back, son; thus far shalt 

 thou go, but no farther." The paper was illustrated by fifty 

 lime-light views, the last one being a view of the great church 

 from the south-west, and in showing it he said that, in bring- 

 ing the subject before the Club, even in this compressed form, 

 he wished in some degree to show that, as a great critic has 

 said, " Architecture is in its origin as essentially a useful 

 art as weaving or ship-building, but almost alone of all her 

 sister arts it is the one that has from various concurrent 

 circumstances been refined into a fine art. When inspired by 

 so lofty an aim as that of providing a house or temple worthy 

 of the Deity, it became one of the noblest and most beautiful 



