I have been in Bristol several times, but I remember the workaday old city as I saw it first. It was September weather, and College Green was strewn with sallow leaves that flitted and whispered continually like memories of the past. A few fat sheep were in possession, together with a statue of Queen Victoria and a Gothic cross. On the south of the Green, once the burial-ground of the abbey, stands the cathedral, the older portion, in contrast with the new, looking black and rough and massy. The jewel of this building--which was one of the few abbey churches to profit by the Dissolution, in that Henry VIII was graciously pleased, establishing the bishopric of Bristol, to raise it to cathedral rank--is its Norman chapter-house, a rectangular chamber wonderfully enriched with stone carvings and diaper work and interlaced arcades. Among the bishops on whom the silvery lights from the Jesse window, the great east window of the choir, have fallen, are Fletcher, father of the dramatist, and Trelawney of Cornish fame. With a lingering look at the Norman archway known as College gate, whose elaborate mouldings are worn on the sea-wind side, but still distinct on the other, I crossed the Green to the Mayor's Chapel, a little Gothic church of peculiar beauty, with windows that are harmonies in glass, and with monuments, among which the burgess element is marked, so old and strange, yet so naïve and natural, that the valour, love, and grief of a far past seem but held in slumber there. If the marble figures rise and talk together on All Saints' Eve, it is a quaint but seemly assemblage. Bristol, even in the palmy days of her rum-trade and her slave-trade, was always singularly given to religion, and her churches are numerous,--St. Peter's, her mother-church, with an Early Norman tower, guarding the ashes of her hapless poet, Richard Savage, who died, a debtor, in Newgate prison hard by and was buried at his jailer's costs; St. Stephen's, whose turreted Perpendicular tower is one of the sights of the city; and many another; but supreme among them all, "The pride of Bristowe and the Western londe,"