There was a landing on the Sussex Coast; a landing of a Duke of Normandy, and a horde of armed cut-throats. Looking at them even through the distance of some eight hundred years, what are they but as a gang of burglars? A band of pick-purses—blood-shedders—robbers! What was this landing of a host of men, in the full trump and blazonry of war—what all their ships, their minstrelsey, and armed power—to the advent of Augustine and his fellow-monks, brought hither by the forlornness of the soul of man? it is this thought that makes this bit of pebbled beach a sacred spot; it is this spirit of meditation that hears in every little wave a sweet and solemn music. And there, where the ocean tumbles, was in the olden day a goodly town, sapped, swallowed by the wearing, the voracious sea. At lowest tides the people still discover odd, quaint, household relics, which, despite the homely breeding of the finders, must carry away their thoughts into the mist of time, and make them feel antiquity. The very children of the village are hucksters of the spoils of dead centuries. They grow up with some small trading knowledge of fossils; and are deep, very deep in all sorts of petrifactions. They must have strange early sympathies towards that mysterious town with all its tradesfolk and market-folk sunk below the sea; a place of which they have a constant inkling in the petty spoils lashed upwards by the tempest. Indeed, it is difficult for the mind to conceive the annihilation of a whole town, engulfed in the ocean. The tricksy fancy will assert itself; and looking over the shining water, with summer basking on it, we are apt to dream that the said market-town has only suffered a “sea-change”; and that fathoms deep, the town still stands—that busy life goes on—that people of an odd, sea-green aspect, it may be, still carry on the work of mortal breathing; make love, beget little ones, and die. But this, indeed, is the dream of idleness. Yet, who—if he could change his mind at will, would make his mind incapable of such poor fantasies? How much of the coarse web of existence owes its beauty to the idlest dreams with which we colour it! The village of Reculvers is a choice work of antiquity. The spirit of King Ethelbert tarries there still, and lives enshrined in the sign of a public-house. It would be well for all kings could their spirits survive with such genial associations. There are some dead royalties too profitless even for a public sign. Who, now, with any other choice would empty a tankard under the auspices of Bloody Mary, as that anointed “femininitie” is called; or take a chop even at Nero’s Head? No; inn-keepers know the subtle prejudices of man, nor violate the sympathies of life with their sign-posts.