It is not the absence of a close that damages Canterbury; the cathedral stands amid grass and trees, with a great garden sweep all round it, and is placed in such a way that, as you pass out from under the gate-house, you appreciate immediately its grand feature--its extraordinary and magnificent length. None of the English cathedrals seems more beautifully isolated, more shut up to itself. It is a long walk beneath the walls from the gateway of the close to the far outer end of the last chapel. Of all that there is to observe in this upward-gazing stroll I can give no detailed account; I can speak only of the general impression. This is altogether delightful. None of the rivals of Canterbury have a more complicated and elaborate architecture, a more perplexing intermixture of periods, a more charming jumble of Norman arches and English points and perpendiculars. What makes the side-view superb, moreover, is the double transepts, which produce a fine modification of gables and buttresses. It is as if two great churches had joined forces toward the middle--one giving its nave and the other its choir, and each keeping its own great cross-aisles. Astride of the roof, between them, sits a huge Gothic tower, which is one of the latest portions of the building, though it looks like one of the earliest, so crumbled and blunted and mellowed is it by time and weather. Like the rest of the structure it has a magnificent color--a sort of rich dull yellow, a something that is neither brown nor gray. This is particularly appreciable from the cloister on the farther side of the church--the side, I mean, away from the town and the open garden-sweep I spoke of; the side that looks toward a damp old deanery lurking behind a brown archway, through which you see young ladies in Gainsborough hats playing something on a patch of velvet turf; the side, in short, that is somehow intermingled with a green quadrangle which serves as a play-ground to a King's School, which is adorned externally with a most precious and picturesque old fragment of Norman staircase. This cloister is not "kept up;" it is very dusky and mouldy and dilapidated, and of course very picturesque. The old black arches and capitals are various and handsome, and in the centre are tumbled together a group of crooked gravestones, themselves almost buried in the deep soft grass. Out of the cloister opens the chapter-house, which is not kept up either, but which is none the less a magnificent structure; a noble lofty hall, with a beautiful wooden roof, simply arched like that of a tunnel, and very grand and impressive from its great sweep and its absence of columns, brackets or supports of any kind. The place is now given up to dust and echoes; but it looks more like a banqueting-hall than a council-room of priests, and as you sit on the old wooden bench, which, raised on two or three steps, runs round the base of the four walls, you may gaze up and make out the