"I could not love thee, dear, so much Loved I not honour more".
"Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage",
he wrote while imprisoned by the House of Commons for presenting a Kentish Petition on behalf of King Charles.
While we are thinking of poets, and their not infrequent tendency (in the past) to a bad end, we may as well walk up High Street. Various epochs and ages look down upon us on either side, though too often through modern windows. Near the top, on the right-hand side, we shall find a very old house with a very new front, and the business label of Achille Serre. This is the birthplace of Christopher Marlowe, one of the nest of Elizabethan singing-birds--
"With mouth of gold, and morning in his eyes",
who, perhaps, had a hand in Shakespeare's _Henry VI_. He was born in the same year as Shakespeare, and, in spite of a reckless life and early death, came nearer to him in power than any other dramatist of the day. He was killed in a tavern brawl before he was thirty, but found time to write immortal things, amongst them "The Passionate Pilgrim":
a quite other sort of pilgrim than those who sought Becket's shrine.
It is said that he was an "atheist", and that the tavern dagger was just in time to save him from imminent risk of stake and faggot. This naturally leads us from his birthplace, along St. George's Terrace, which is really the old earthwork faced with mediæval stone, to the spot where atheists, heretics, traitors, and witches used to meet their fate. This is the Dane John already mentioned as a pre-historic mound. Dr. Cox, in his volume on Canterbury in the "Ancient Cities" series, gives the following extract from the city accounts touching the death on the Dane John of one John Stone, an Austin friar, who denied that the Sovereign was Supreme Head of the Church:--
"Paid for half a tonne of tymber to make a payre of Gallaces to hang Fryer Stone. For a Carpenter for making the same Gallaces and the dray. For a labourer who digged the holes. To iiij men who holp set up the Gallaces. For drynk to them. For carriage of tymber from Stablegate to the Dongeon. For ij men that sett the Ketyl and parboyled hym. To ij men that caryed his quarters to the gate and set them up. For a halter to hang hym. For two halfpenny halters. For Sandwich cord. For Strawe. To the woman that scowred the Ketyll. To hym that dyd execucion iiijs viijd."