Canterbury has seen a great deal of this senseless disregard for antiquity. Six gates, as I have said, were wantonly destroyed, but the passion for destruction did not stop here. The remains of the Norman castle were years ago converted into a coal-hole of the local gasworks, and are still put to that degradation; great stretches of the city walls, with their watchtowers, were taken down for corn-mills to be built with their materials; and, worse than all, stupidity of this kind ran riot among the Dean and Chapter in the thirties. For seven hundred and fifty years had Lanfranc's north-western tower of the Cathedral stood, while the south-western had been rebuilt nearly three hundred years before. This dissimilarity vexed those assembled holders of fat prebends and decanal loaves and fishes, who drank port and read _The Times_, and had not a single sensible idea in their meagre brainpans, beyond a notion that one thing ought to match with another, and that as every Jack should have his Jill, so also should everything else possess a pendant. How truly British! [Illustration: WESTGATE, CANTERBURY.] Well, if these western towers did not match, they must be made to; and so to find an excuse for pulling down the older one. There is always some graceless modern architect, with palm itching for five-per-cent. commissions, who would undertake or advise anything to procure a job, and the Dean and Chapter found such a man, who conceived Lanfranc's work to have gone beyond repair. To this creature, Charles Austin, their own diocesan architect, who should have been earnest to preserve, rather than to destroy, they gave instructions for the pulling down of the Norman work and for its replacement by an exact copy of the Perpendicular tower. The thing was done in 1832. So little beyond repair and so sturdily strong was that Norman tower, that it was necessary to blow it up with gunpowder. A German invading Goth and malignant destroyer could do no more. The work of demolition and the building of the new tower was done at a cost of L25,000. The architect pocketed L1,250 as commission, and all who care for architecture have lost one of the very few Norman Cathedral towers known in England. But then, how exactly those towers match, and how satisfied must be all good people who would sacrifice everything for the sake of uniformity! The main thoroughfare of Canterbury, to which the old West Gate gives access, has undergone no little rebuilding since the days of gables and timber fronts, and yet it retains in the aggregate much of that old-world air for which we reasonably look in a Cathedral city. Long and narrow the street remains; quaint are many of the buildings that line it. Across it, under narrow bridges, flow two branches of the little river Stour. An amusing incident belonged to the "Red Lion." [Sidenote: THE DUC DE NIVERNAIS]