While Winchelsea dreamed, at any rate, she worked, and the noble fragment of her great church, rising solid from the abortive symmetry of her great square, helps us to put our hand on her deep good faith. She built at least as she believed—she planned as she fondly imagined. The huge ivy-covered choir and transepts of St. Thomas of Canterbury—to whom the structure was addressed—represent to us a great intention. They are not so mighty, but they are almost as brave, as the wondrous fragment of Beauvais. Walled and closed on their unfinished side, they form at present all the church, and, with its grand lines of arch and window, its beautiful gothic tombs and general hugeness and height, the church—mercifully exempt as yet from restoration—is wonderful for the place. You may at this hour—if you are given to such emotions—feel a mild thrill, not be unaware even of the approach of tears, as you measure the scale on which the building had been planned and the ground that the nave and aisles would have covered. You murmur, in the summer twilight, a soft “Bravo!” across the ages—to the ears of heaven knows what poor nameless ghosts. The square—apparently one of many—was to have been worthy of New York or of Turin; for the queerest, quaintest, most touching thing of all is that the reinstated city was to have been laid out on the most approved modern lines. Nothing is more interesting—to the mooning, sketching spectator—than this evidence that the great Edward had anticipated us all in the convenient chessboard pattern. It is true—attention has been called to the fact—that Pompeii had anticipated _him_; but I doubt if he knew much about Pompeii. His abstract avenues and cross-streets straggle away, through the summer twilight, into mere legend and mystery. In speaking awhile since of the gates of these shattered strongholds as “stiff,” I also spoke of their walls as “tight;” but the scheme of Winchelsea must have involved, after all, a certain looseness of cincture. The old vague girdle is lost to-day in the fields where the sheep browse, in the parkish acres where the great trees cluster. The Sussex oak is mighty—it was of the Sussex oak that, in the old time, the king’s ships were built; it was, in particular, to her command of this material that Rye owed the burdensome honour of supplying vessels, on constant call, to the royal navy. Strange is this record, in Holloway’s History of that town, and in presence of the small things of to-day; so perpetual, under stress, appears to have been the demand and so free the supply and the service.