And a fine old town it is, still keeping, in its four right-angled streets, the original Roman plan. Large vessels can make their way up the Severn as far as Gloucester, which Elizabeth, to Bristol's neighbourly disgust, chartered as a seaport, though the Berkeley Canal, opened in 1827, is now the regular channel. The cathedral stands upon ground hallowed since the seventh century. This building, for all the solemn grandeur of its Norman nave, is of most interest, from an architectural point of view, because of its gradual development of the Perpendicular style, gloriously manifest in choir and cloister. Its masons seem to have been particularly ingenious, for the building abounds in original and fanciful features of which the Whispering Gallery is only an example. Its martyr is John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester. One of Mary's earliest victims, he was sent from London back to Gloucester, where he was greatly beloved, to be burned before the eyes of his own flock. Many royal prayers have been murmured beneath these vaulted roofs, and many royal feasts of Severn salmon and lamprey-pie held in the grey city. The Saxon kings were much at Gloucester; William the Conqueror spent his Yule-tides here whenever he could, and here, in the chapter house, he ordered the compilation of Domesday Book; Rufus, Henry I, Henry II, and John often visited the town, and Henry III, as a boy of ten, was crowned in the cathedral. Parliaments were held in Gloucester by Edward I, Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V, and from Gloucester Richard III, with whom murder had grown to be a habit, is supposed to have sent secret orders to the Tower for the smothering of his little nephews. In a side-chapel is the tomb of Robert, Duke of Normandy, eldest son of the conqueror. The effigy, of Irish oak, is so instinct with force and vigour in its only half recumbent posture that the iron screen seems really necessary to hold the Norman down. But the royal burial that made the fortunes of the cathedral was that of the wretched Edward II, whose canopied tomb in the choir became a favourite shrine of pilgrimage. Still the Severn, now with a burden of heavily freighted barges, a mighty flood that has left more than one hundred miles behind the tiny pool, three inches deep, in which it rose, sweeps on, past the stern walls of Berkeley Castle, where Edward II was cruelly done to death, toward the Somerset boundary. Here it receives the waters of the lower Avon, on which the great port of Bristol stands, and so the proud Sabrina leads her retinue of streams into the Bristol Channel, "Supposing then herself a sea-god by her traine." FOOTNOTES: [7] Leland. [8] "Gregory's Chronicle." In "Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century." Camden Society: 1876. SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE