We must pass over the records of civic feasts and aldermanic junketings, which would fill a volume, and seek out the old "Briton's Arms," in the same city, a thatched building of venerable appearance with its projecting upper storeys and lofty gable. It looks as if it may not long survive the march of progress.
The parish of Heigham, now part of the city of Norwich, is noted as having been the residence of Bishop Hall, "the English Seneca," and author of the _Meditations_, on his ejection from the bishopric in 1647 till his death in 1656[43] The house in which he resided, now known as the Dolphin Inn, still stands, and is an interesting building with its picturesque bays and mullioned windows and ingeniously devised porch. It has actually been proposed to pull down, or improve out of existence, this magnificent old house. Its front is a perfect specimen of flint and stone sixteenth-century architecture. Over the main door appears an episcopal coat of arms with the date 1587, while higher on the front appears the date of a restoration (in two bays):--
[43] It is erroneously styled Bishop Hall's Palace. An episcopal palace is the official residence of the bishop in his cathedral city. Not even a country seat of a bishop is correctly called a palace, much less the residence of a bishop when ejected from his see.
[Illustration: The "Briton's Arms," Norwich]
Just inside the doorway is a fine Gothic stoup into which bucolic rustics now knock the fag-ends of their pipes. The staircase newel is a fine piece of Gothic carving with an embattled moulding, a poppy-head and heraldic lion. Pillared fire-places and other tokens of departed greatness testify to the former beauty of this old dwelling-place.
[Illustration: The Dolphin Inn, Heigham, Norwich]
We will now start back to town by the coach which leaves the "Maid's Head" (or did leave in 1762) at half-past eleven in the forenoon, and hope to arrive in London on the following day, and thence hasten southward to Canterbury. Along this Dover road are some of the best inns in England: the "Bull" at Dartford, with its galleried courtyard, once a pilgrims' hostel; the "Bull" and "Victoria" at Rochester, reminiscent of _Pickwick_; the modern "Crown" that supplants a venerable inn where Henry VIII first beheld Anne of Cleves; the "White Hart"; and the "George," where pilgrims stayed; and so on to Canterbury, a city of memories, which happily retains many features of old English life that have not altogether vanished. Its grand cathedral, its churches, St. Augustine's College, its quaint streets, like Butchery Lane, with their houses bending forward in a friendly manner to almost meet each other, as well as its old inns, like the "Falstaff" in High Street, near West Gate, standing on the site of a pilgrims' inn, with its sign showing the valiant and portly knight, and supported by elaborate ironwork, its tiled roof and picturesque front, all combine to make Canterbury as charming a place of modern pilgrimage as it was attractive to the pilgrims of another sort who frequented its inns in days of yore.