LAMBETH PALACE 
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 carrying-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 fluttermg 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 
