The great church of Kendal lies low, by the river, and is great, not in height, nor in any imposing architectural design, but in the sheer ground-space it covers. It has no fewer than five aisles, and by consequence of them looks squat. It is a kind of Westmoreland Westminster Abbey, the place of sepulture of barons and squires innumerable from the castle on the hill yonder and from the country round about. Their private chapels, where Parrs and Bellinghams, Stricklands, Howards, and others lie, are now not a little the worse for wear, and no longer private; and their mortuary glories obscured. But to one of the old school of county historians or patient genealogists, the interior of Kendal church would be, in the way of hatchments, heraldic carvings, and flatulent epitaphs, the study of years. More to my purpose are the strange incidents and the odd inscriptions of the place. [Sidenote: “_ROBIN THE DEVIL_”] There hangs, for example, in the once private chapel of the dead and gone Bellinghams a helmet with a story. Once, it seems, in the days when Cavalier and Roundhead fought out their dispute, there flourished a family of Philipsons in the Windermere district, with a notorious person, Major Robert Philipson, at their head: so wild and reckless that he was commonly known as “Robin the Devil.” It is hardly necessary to add that he was not a Puritan. This rumbustious character, greatly incensed that the Puritans should have established themselves in the town, under one Colonel Briggs, set out one Sunday with a number of horsemen, to kill the colonel in church. Happily for Briggs, he had not attended service that day, and Philipson, rampaging with drawn sword over the building, was baulked of his prey: although it does not seem quite certain that Robin would have been fortunate had Briggs been present, for even without their commander the people present made him run, and in his haste to go his helmet was knocked off against an archway. He did not stop to recover it, but made off as quick as he could go. So much for your daredevils. The helmet was hung up as a trophy. But Smelfungus, the antiquary, who must for always be spoiling the best stories with his dry facts, tells us that the helmet is really a portion of the funeral armour of Sir Roger Bellingham, suspended over his tomb. Among the interesting items in Kendal Church are pieces of an ancient cross, dated about A.D. 850, and the monument to over one hundred and fifty officers and men of the 55th (Westmoreland) Regiment, who fell in that most stupid of blunders, the Crimean War, from which none, save the Army contractors, ever reaped any advantage. Here, too, is a Chinese “Dragon Flag,” captured at Chusan, and deposited in the church in 1874. [Sidenote: _REPARTEE_]