The Marlowe Memorial deserves attention. It is in the form of a nude bronze figure representing the Muse of Poetry, placed on a stone pedestal, and in the act of playing upon a lyre; but it is an exceedingly plump and eminently erotic, rather than intellectual, figure thus made to stand for the Muse--a Doll Tearsheet, with a coarse, sensual face, most inappropriately shaded by a wreath of poetic bays. The last touch of vulgarity is that especially municipal idea of giving the whole thing a smart finish by surrounding it with four ornate street-lamps. [Illustration: THE DARK ENTRY.] Burgate Street, branching off from this point to the right, is the street where Barham was born; but our present business is to the Close, and round the south side of the Cathedral to the east end, where the Norman infirmary ruins stand. Turning here to the left, a narrow, stone-paved passage, in between high, ancient walls, leads crookedly through the romantic remains of the domestic buildings of the old monastery to the cloisters and the north side of the Cathedral. It is a twilight place, even now, in the brightest days of summer, and was once, before portions of it were unroofed, much darker. That was the time when it obtained its existing name of the "Dark Entry." If the pages of the _Ingoldsby Legends_ are opened, and the legend of "Nell Cook" is read, much will be found on the subject of this gloomy passage. That legend is the "King's Scholar's Story": the terror of a schoolboy of King Henry VIII.'s school, on the north side of the precincts, at the prospect of being sent back by the haunted entry after dark, on a Friday, when the ghost of Nell Cook was supposed to have its weekly outing. Well might anyone believing in ghosts and omens especially desire not to meet that spirit, for such an encounter was supposed to presage the death of the person within the year: [Illustration: THE DARK ENTRY, CANTERBURY.] "Now nay, dear Uncle Ingoldsby, now send me not I pray, Back by that Entry dark, for that you know's the nearest way; I dread that Entry dark with Jane alone at such an hour, It fears me quite--it's Friday night!--and then Nell Cook hath pow'r." "And who, silly child, is Nell Cook?" asks Uncle Ingoldsby; and the King's Scholar answers: "It was in bluff King Harry's days, while yet he went to shrift, And long before he stamped and swore, and cut the Pope adrift; There lived a portly Canon then, a sage and learned clerk; He had, I trow, a goodly house, fast by that Entry dark. "The Canon was a portly man--of Latin and of Greek, And learned lore, he had good store,--yet health was on his cheek. The Priory fare was scant and spare, the bread was made of rye, The beer was weak, yet he was sleek--he had a merry eye.