Say what you will of the austerities supposed to belong to the monastic life, those recluses of old lived a life as jolly, as careless, and as free, as the gayest of us in this 19th century! Yonder, at the head of that staircased recess in the south wall, is the ancient Oratory, from which one of the ‘knights of the cowl’ daily ‘said grace,’ and pronounced a classic oration, while his brethren were at meals in the spacious hall beneath him. Oh, what a sight for carnal eyes like his to dwell and gloat upon! But we must not soliloquise. The Fratry, or Refectory, in the days we are describing, was of nobler dimensions even than now; for it then extended some twenty or thirty feet farther westward, and was doubtless shorn of its fair proportions at the time the present road was constructed from the Abbey Square. This room, which is 98 feet long and 34 feet high, has a range of six pointed windows on the one side, and four on the other, and had once an eastern lancet-shaped window of considerable beauty. Of the window of the present day we forbear to speak; simply let us hope that the hour is at hand, when so hideous an abortion of all that is “chaste and beautiful in art” shall vanish from the scene, and be replaced by a window worthy of the apartment it was meant to adorn! The steps leading up to the Oratory communicated originally with the DORMITORY of the Abbey, which prior to the present century occupied the higher range of the eastern cloister, but has now entirely disappeared. At the Reformation, when King Henry VIII. transformed the Abbey into a Cathedral, he founded here, in the thirty-sixth year of his reign, a GRAMMAR SCHOOL for twenty-four boys, and endowed it with a Head Master, and numerous privileges, some of which it was _our_ lot, twenty years ago, personally to share. The history of the School, and of the many Cheshire worthies educated within its walls, would furnish matter for a distinct treatise, and it is not improbable that such may one day appear from our humble pen. For the present, then, we will retire from this scene of our boyhood’s delight, and ascending the range of steps near the entrance door, emerge from the “bosom of our spiritual mother” at a point very close to the head of Abbey Street. CHAPTER IX. Abbey Square, Deanery, and Palace.—The Abbey Gates.—Chester Markets, and Abbot’s Fair.—Northgate, and old City Gaol.—St. John’s Hospital and Blue School.—Newtown, and Christ Church.—Railway Tunnel.—St. Thomas’ Chapel.—Training College. THE smell of sanctity yet fresh upon us, let us now continue, as best we may, our peregrinations northward.