was
compelled to refound it, and therefore in some sort it still remains to
us. It is curious to note that, ages before the hospital came to
Lambeth, St Thomas was at home there, for he had a statue upon the
Lollards' Tower, and it was the custom of the watermen to doff their
caps to it as they rowed by.
It is meet and right that this pilgrimage should be begun with thoughts
of St Thomas, and especially of what we owe to him, for the first few
miles of the way upon what we need not doubt was of old the Pilgrims'
road, is anything but uplifting, crowded though it be with memories,
most of them of course far later than the Canterbury pilgrimage. As you
go down the Borough High Street, for Southwark is of course the old
_borgo_ of London, and all the depressing ugliness of modern life, it
is not of anything so serene as that great poet of the fourteenth
century, the father of English poetry, that you think, but of one who
nevertheless, in the characteristic nationalism of his art, in his
humanity and love of his fellow-men, was only second to Chaucer, and in
his compassion for the poor and lowly only second to St Thomas: I mean
Charles Dickens.
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