For more than a century and a half Margate has been a holiday-place, and therefore wears an air of permanency which not even Brighton can beat, although its front is more miscellaneous and less stately. In fact, it looks whimsically as though one side of Gower Street had come down from London, for a change--and had not yet benefited by it! Matthew Arnold must have been similarly impressed when he wrote that this was a “brick-and-mortar image of English Protestantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeliness--let me add, all its salubrity.” He had, you perceive, an unworthy affection for the tawdry rags of Continental Roman Catholicism, however insalubrious their nature, and in spite of his much-advertised craving for “sweetness and light.” Arnold’s sneer at Protestantism offended many, but we have travelled far and swiftly on the down-grade in the last half-century, and the thing that would once have seemed impossible has come to pass: Protestantism has become a term of abuse. We have lived to see _that_! “Margate” may have been originally the “Meer-geat,” the Anglo-Saxon for “sea-gate”; or more probably the name derived from the “mere,” or little stream, which flowed down to the sea past St. John’s Church, along the line of the street now called The Brooks; “mere” being a well-known Kentish word for a stream. However that may be, Margate is really of ancient origin: an historical fact rather obscured by the growth of the town. Still, one has only to seek that old parish church of St. John to perceive that this was an established place in Norman times. Strange though it may seem, “Margate” was once considered a separate village or hamlet on the seashore, as we read in the itinerary of John Leland, in the time of Henry the Eighth: “Meregate lyith in St. John’s paroche in Thanet v miles upward from Reculver; there is a village and a peere for shyppes now sore decayed.” [Illustration: FROM THE PALIMPSEST BRASS, MARGATE CHURCH.] [Illustration: FROM THE PALIMPSEST BRASS, MARGATE CHURCH.]