On Sunday and the day following, when I attended service in the cathedral, I had the best opportunities for surveying it throughout, under the attentive guidance of Lord Charles Thynne and the estimable Archdeacon Harrison. I am glad to say that the service here was very effectively celebrated, though a larger force would have been more worthy of the place and of the work. The organ is quite concealed in the triforia, and its sound is somewhat peculiar as it issues from those high cells, in perfect unison with “the full-voiced choir below.” As to the effect of the cathedral upon the eye, I remember no interior, save that of Milan, which can compare with it for impressiveness; and if, from general effect, we descend to details, this cathedral is vastly the more solemn and magnificent of the twain. Its altar, for example, is one of the most lofty in Christendom, the choir rising from the nave by a long flight of steps, and the altar being elevated, in like manner, very high above the level of the choir. The several ascents and various levels of the Church, instead of too much breaking its whole, seem to add an air of vastness and sublimity to the general design. But when one surveys, now the nave, and looks upwards into the tower, and along the far-sweeping vaultings, and now the choir and its intersecting arches and vistas; or descends to that varied undercroft, with its chapels and sepulchres, and twisted columns, and French inscriptions; or mounts to make circuit of the tombs and chapels, pausing within “Becket’s Crown” to admire its unique and anomalous elegance; and then makes his way through the cloisters into the chapter-house, and finally escapes into outer day, and looks up again at the vast pile, through which he has been wondering and wandering so long—the impression left upon the mind is one of astonishment, like that of the Queen of Sheba, when “there was no more spirit in her.” I had seen the spot where Becket fell beneath the stout blows of his murderers—the marble floor which received his blood still exhibiting a speaking memorial of the tragedy, in a small mutilation which was made in sawing out the bloody block, to be carried to Rome as a relic; I had seen the remains of the same prelate’s shrine, where his sovereign submitted to flagellation, where princes presented so many costly oblations, and which once glittered with such gorgeous wealth before the eye of Erasmus; I had seen the stone-stairs leading up to his sepulchre, worn away by the thousands of devotees, among which I reckoned those of certain Canterburie pilgrims, accompanied by Dan Chaucer himself; I had seen the tomb of the Black Prince, with his lion-like effigy—over which dangles his surcoat, a thing of tatters, but which no one can behold without emotion, when he reflects that it once encased the beating heart and chivalrous breast of that gallant Plantagenet. I had beheld the recumbent effigies of the usurping