These four quarters meet at the Market Cross, whence
the streets that divide the city set out for the four quarters of the
world.
To come into Chichester to-day even by the quiet red-brick street--
South Street--from the railway station, the least interesting entry
into the city, is to understand at once what Chichester is; one of
those country towns that is to say, cities in the good old sense,
because they were the seat of the Bishop, which are not only the pride
of England, but perhaps the best things left to her and certainly the
most characteristic of all that she truly means and stands for. If such
places are without the feverish and confused life of the great
industrial centres of modern England, let us thank God for it, they
have nevertheless a quiet vitality of their own, which in the long run
will prove more persistent and strong than the futile excitement of
places noisy with machinery and wretched with the enslaved poor. Such
places as Chichester may indeed stand for England in a way that
Manchester, for instance, with its cosmopolitan population and
egotistical ambition, its greed, its helplessness, and appalling
intellectual mongrelism and parvenu and international society, can
never hope to do.
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