delaying his decision in order to exact more money, which seems not to have been spared. At length he gave judgment that the archbishop had the right of visitation all through his province, but for the unseemly brawling and fighting in Smithfield he condemned him to rebuild, at his own cost, Lambeth Palace, which was then in a dilapidated condition. Although he was ever zealous and earnest in his defence of the people against kingly and priestly tyranny, and supported the barons in this and the preceding reign, it was in his old age, when verging upon the grave, that Basset especially made a display of that bravery and sturdy English love of freedom and hatred of oppression which entitles him to the designation at the head of this chapter. King Henry and the Pope had conspired together to levy a tax on the English clergy, and share the plunder. Rustand, the Pope's legate, with this view, convoked a meeting of the clergy of London, and made his demand in the name of the Pope. Basset rose and replied, in unmeasured terms, on the illegality and oppressive nature of the exaction, finishing by saying that rather than submit to so intolerable a demand he would lose his head, and in this he was backed by his clergy, who passed an unanimous resolution to ignore any such claim altogether. The legate laid his complaint before the king, who sent for the bishop, abused him with vile and menacing language, and threatened him with deprivation and Papal censure. Basset listened meekly to all the king had to say, but when he left his presence he said to those who he knew would carry it to the king, "He may remove my mitre, if it so pleases him, but he will find a helmet beneath it, and he may take away my crosier, but that is easily replaced with a sword." M. Paris says of him, "He was a noble and honourable man, and, excepting his last slip, the anchor of the whole kingdom, and the shield of stability and defence." Weever also says, "As he was a man of great lineage, and also of ample—both temporal and ecclesiastical—possessions, so he was a prelate of an invincible, high spirit; stout and courageous to resist those insupportable exactions which the Pope's legate, Rustandus, went about to lay upon the clergie." In the year 1256 he commenced the erection of the church of St. Faith, under St. Paul's cathedral, founded a charity in St. Paul's for the repose of his soul, and bequeathed to the cathedral a golden apple, two carved chests for relics, some vestments, and a few manuscripts. An Old London Diarist. In the sixteenth century there dwelt in the parish of Holy Trinity the Less, Queenhithe, a worthy and honest citizen, one Henry Machyn, a member of the Merchant Taylors' Company. He was born about the period of the accession of Henry VIII., and lived until after the accession of Elizabeth, dying, it is presumed, in 1563, of the plague which visited London in that year, when his diary comes to an abrupt conclusion.