TOMB OF MARY TUDOR.

305

Becket, with a goodly company of angels playing on musical instruments, besides bishops, kings, and armoured knights.

This church contains several tombs of interest. In the chancel we came upon a plain marble tablet, with the following inscribed thereon:

Sacred to the Memory of

MARY TUDOR,

Third Daught of Henry ye 7th, King of England,
and Queen of France.

Who was first married in 1514 to
Louis ye 12th, King of France,
and afterwards in 1517 to
Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk.
She died in his lifetime in 1533,
At ye Manor of Westhorp in this Coun3,
And was interred in ye same year in ye

Monastery of St. Edmund's Bury,
And was removed into this Church
After ye Dissolution of ye Abbey.

The tomb was opened last century. Why, I wonder? Cannot the noble dead be left to rest in peace, undisturbed by the prying inquisitiveness of man? On that occasion one of the churchwardens cut off a lock of the deceased queen's hair, the flaxen lock that we were shown in the museum.

One of the most ancient altar-tombs is to a John Baret, and though interesting is most ghastly to look upon. The body, laid on the top of the monument, is shown as an emaciated corpse, but a too realistic copy of one that had long been buried. The anatomy of the carving is wonderful, and the figure has a kind of morbid attraction that compels you to look at it whether you will or no. I should not care X

to attend service in view of that strange, weird memorial of the dead. On it is written in most perplexing English :

Ho that wil sadly beholde me with his ie

May se hys owyn merowr a lerne for to die.

The figure on that monument haunted us for days long after. And such is the end of poor humanity, with all its wonderful genius, its marvellous inventions, and the rare creations of its brain!

All passes,-Art alone
Enduring stays to us;

The bust outlasts the throne

The coin Tiberius.

There are some old brasses in the church, but none of special interest; there are likewise some modern ones, the over-perfect, precise-cut lettering of which is in marked contrast with the feeling, nervous, distinctly non-mechanical engraving of the old work. There is an individuality about the one; the inscriptions on it are full of character, like to the writing of a letter. You feel almost something of the personality of the ancient engraver; the very marks of his tool are still upon them, cut with his own hand. The modern brasses are to the old ones as is a printed leaf to a page of an ancient missal, or the mechanical chromograph to the work of the brush; and surely they are not so very precious as to need placing upon the wall (where a brass should never be), framed in oak and glazed as they are here?

As we glanced back on leaving the church, the view we had was most impressive; the glorious

A QUAINT EPITAPH

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carved roof above, the soaring columns, the ancient mellowed walls, the pavement below, were charged with countless glowing tints as the softened sunshine shone through the traceried windows of stained glass reflecting their colours over all. In the churchyard here is an old tombstone, the epitaph on which, fast weathering away, is perhaps worth preserving:

Here lies Joan Kitchner; when her glass was spent,
She kicked up her heels and away she went.

Then, wandering about, we found our way to the modern Roman Catholic church, a plain structure in the too familiar style of nineteenth-century classic. The interior looked bare to us. What a contrast to the gorgeous fane formerly dedicated to St. Edmund here! In this church we noticed an alms-box made, so an inscription below informed us, from the wood of the very tree to which St. Edmund was tied when he suffered martyrdom. Was this a nest-egg for future relics, we wondered? One thing we could not help noting, that whilst all the various inscriptions in the church were in Latin, a language not understood of poor people (and sometimes not always by rich), the requests for money for the church were in very plain English.

CHAPTER XVII.

A Pleasant Country-Old Toll-gates---The Homes of the People-The Modern and the Last Century Traveller-Home Travel-Ruskin on Railways-A Picturesque Village-An Old Tudor MansionAn Ancient Moated Manor House-The Beauty of Old Buildings -An Ideal Hostelry-The Coaching Inns of the Past-A Prosperous Farmer-One Result of Agricultural Depression—A Holiday in a Farmhouse.

In the morning, before leaving our comfortable inn, we were taken down a dark staircase to inspect the groined cellars, which, as I have before remarked, the landlord told us belonged of old to the abbey. In these we had pointed out to us the recesses said to have been used by the monks for the sacramental wines, and the built-up wall where the underground passage from the monastery is supposed to have entered. Possibly these may have been the abbey cellars, but if so, why, when they had so great a quantity of land enclosed, the monks did not construct their cellar within their own walls, instead of going such a distance away, entailing an awkward underground approach, is truly a puzzling problem.

Looking at the stone roofing, as far as we could judge by the uncertain flickering light of a tallow candle, it seemed to us that the groining was rudely done, and not at all like the usual careful masonry of the olden monks. Indeed, as the Angel stands

! OLD-FASHIONED WAYS.

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on the site of a still earlier inn, and as we know of several ancient hostels in different parts of the country, with similar rough groined cellars, it seems more probable, in spite of the tradition of the house, that these were merely the cellars of an earlier inn.

As we were leaving, the landlord came to the door to see us off and wish us a prosperous journey in the friendly old-fashioned way. Such little attentions cost nothing, but are very pleasing, and make the traveller feel more like a welcome guest, departing from a country visit, than a mere wanderer in a strange land simply leaving a house of entertain

ment.

The country around Bury St. Edmunds is pleasantly diversified by wood and water and green fields, by time-toned homes of ancient date that tell of long abiding and give a humanising aspect to the landscape. We had not proceeded far on our way when we came to a very pretty village by the side of a sparkling stream, which stream was crossed by a grey old bridge. Here was an old toll-house, the turnpike-gate being, however, conspicuous by its absence-one of the few old-fashioned and formerly familiar features of the road this latter, whose improvement away we can all rejoice at. The having to pull up ever and again (when driving by road) before a closed gate, whilst the ancient keeper thereof hobbled out to open it, and hobbled in again for change, was not a pleasant experience; and once or twice on a dark night when touring through an unknown country (when such things were), we have