One marvels by what suavity of demeanour, what tact, double-dealing, and wholesale jettison of principles and personal convictions, political, social, and religious, this man of many dignities contrived to keep and augment his fortune and preserve his head upon his shoulders in the hurly-burly and general quick-change of those times in which he lived, when an incautious word meant Tower Hill and the executioner's axe, or, at the very least of it, the forfeiture of property. Surely he did not wear his heart upon his sleeve who moved thus freely in Courts, and who died, undisturbed and in the fulness of time, in his bed. Minster church is rich in other monuments. Here in a recess of the wall can still be seen the mutilated alabaster effigy of a knight in armour, representing an unfortunate Spanish prisoner of rank captured by Drake off Calais harbour at the descent of the Armada in 1588. This poor Don Jeronimo Magno, of Salamanca, was given into the custody of Sir Edward Hoby, Constable of Queenborough and Commander at the Nore, who kept him for three years a prisoner aboard ship at that rough and boisterous anchorage. It is not surprising that the unhappy Jeronimo died at the end of that time--unless we like to be surprised that he stood it so long. He was buried here December 5th, 1591. The hooligan instincts of fanatical religious reformers, and still more those of the succeeding centuries of village goths and visitant 'Arrys, have bashed the nose of the effigy, shorn off at the elbow his once devoutly clasped arms, and scored him about with their quite uninteresting initials. Another such effigy, not so ill-treated, is that supposed to represent Jordanus de Scapeia, whose clasped hands still hold between their fingers a mystic oval sculptured with a little effigy thought to symbolise the soul. This monument was found buried in the churchyard, in 1833, five feet deep. [Illustration: THE SOUL, FROM A MONUMENT IN MINSTER-IN-SHEPPEY CHURCH.] From this hilltop churchyard one may glimpse a view whose like is not often seen. Sheerness to one side, the narrow ribbon of the Swale, the broad channels of the Medway and the Thames, and the great expanse of slimy marshes, gleam under the summer sun like burnished steel. When evening comes and the sunbeams slant downwards from dun-coloured clouds, the scene is one to make an artist despair of ever adequately rendering the beauty of it.