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SEND you three Kentish Drawings, taken in the year 1785. Plate II. Fig. 1. is a View of the Archiepiscopal Palace of Ford. From the ruins of walls and the foundations that remain, little can be collected, but that the buildings were extensive. Archbishop Cranmer used to be much at Ford, towards the latter end especially of King Edward's reign. Philpot calls it a magnificent mansion, given by Ethelbert, king of Kent, unto the see of Canterbury. Archbishop Parker, in a letter to the Lord Treasurer, describes Ford Palace as " a large, but an old, decayed, wasteful, unwholesome, and desolate house. Ford was in such a corner, and the soil such, as he thought no man would have delight to dwell there, if he had any other place nigher the church." He wanted to pull it down, and with the materials repair his palaces at Bekesborn and Canterbury. This plan did not take effect.

In 1637, Archbishop Abbot, on refusing to license a sermon preached by Dr. Sipthorpe, at Northampton assizes, in justification of a loan which Charles I. had demanded, was ordered by his Majesty to withdraw to his house at Ford.

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By a survey taken by order of Parliament in 1647, preserved among the records at Lambeth, it appears the premises then consisted of, The gate house, or lodge, usually the housekeeper's, of four ground-rooms, and three above, and two bays of outhousing, all built with brick, a small orchard and garden, with a dove-house, timberbuilt, covered with tile; in the whole eight acres broad, with the park unstored with deer, containing 166 acres of gravelly and sandy land; value per annum 431. 10s. All the materials of all the building worth, to be sold, 8201. The premises are within seven miles of Canterbury, and three from the sea."

At or about this period, the house was pulled down by order of the Parliamentary Sequestrators; and by a decree 19 Charles II. the see of Canterbury was freed from re-building this palace, as also of those at Canterbury and Bekesborn *.

Fig. 2. is a South-west View of Salmeston Grange, vulgarly Samson, formerly belonging to the monastery of St. Augustine, Canterbury. Much of the original building yet remains, particularly the chapel, infirmary, and some of the inferior offices.

Fig 3. shews an East Prospect of the Church and Manor-house of Minster, The front of the manor-house is much modernized since the drawing in Lewis's Antiquities of Thanet was made. The ruins of a tower at the South angle of the building are part of the chapel belonging to the nunnery of this place.

Yours, &c.

Mr. URBAN,

D. & P.

June 21.

WITH pleasure I take the pen to

answer your Correspondent Perseverans' letter, p. 312), wherein he seems to have mistaken my meaning, which makes it necessary for me to state my motives in addressing you upon the subject; and here, I must declare, I never had the least intention, or the remotest idea, of contending against the worthy and wellmeaning Society who offer their terms of salvation to the Jews. From an intimate acquaintance with these people's prejudices, and their tenacity to their old laws, which must be allowed to have originated in the First Cause itself, my intentions were solely to draw out some literary Israelite to have denied or acknowledged what I had said. But these people are not polemics; and their aversion to meddie in any disputes where the religion of the country is concerned, is the obvious cause that we can receive no information from them. It is a fact, that, during the latter days of the life of my friend the late David Levi, the community was in the greatest terror at his venturing to answer Paine's Age of Reason," fearing the civil authority or ecclesiastical law would be moved against him, and bring serious consequences upon themselves.

With due deference to Perseverans, I must say that his position is wrong, that Jews have a right to the advantages of Citizenship as free-born subjects; they have not in the Corpora

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tion of London; otherwise Cheapside and St. Paul's Church-yard would be totally filled with them, and every shop shut on Saturday.

A Jew may obtain his freedom by the king's service, or by a regular apprenticeship of seven years; but I am certain it cannot be obtained by purchase, as other subjects may have it; as i have been informed by the late Mr. Chamberlain Wilkes, and his attorney Mr. Parker; my own freedom being objected to on that ground, from a misconception that I was one of those people, to whom, they said, they never allowed it on the grounds I got mine, which was by purchase, in 1786. Neither can they purchase or hold freeholds, in so much that they cannot vote for members of parliament, although by previous naturalization they may become eligible and qualified, as the late Sir Samson Gideon.

Since reading your Magazine, I have made some inquiries among the most sensible of both the communities of the Jews, Portuguese and Dutch, who, though prejudiced against Mr. Frey as an innovator, still have a grateful regard for the advantage which the London Society benevolently hold out to them; but the converting of the young ones, they say, is very blameable. The two high priests, the Rev. Raphael Meldola, of the Portuguese, and the Rev. Solomon Hirschell, of the Dutch synagogue, are both of the same opi nion; and, although they will not write upon the subject, any one may converse with them privately, and be satisfied with their reasons.

Would Perseverans know what adults have been proselyted, he may learn at the chapel, that the two pew openers, and two or three others, are all that have come over, and by the means of money! Could the avowal of the consent of the parents of the children be obtained, and signed in the synagogue chambers by the wardens and overseers, it would add to the dignity of such transactions: but no such thing is the case; therefore, such conversions are very doubtful; and it has happened that, more than once, Jewish children have been reclaimed from this asylum by their parents, who, however poor, would not suffer their children to obtain the simple and useful elements of English

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at the expence of their faith. ought to be observed here, that these people have been of ONE OPINION in matters of religious worship ever since their dispersion; and no schisma has been found distracting their church throughout the whole period of time. They hold in the highest contempt the mutability of faith, and prefer a zealot of any persuasion to one who leaves one profession for another. The case of the man called Lord George Gordon, who became a Jew in Newgate, comes not in point here, as his reasons were not rational, and he had to do only with the most abandoned and unprincipled Hebrews in London, who visited him for the loaves and fishes only.

The scheme of the Jews' Conversion, like all other projects, has its probabilities and possibilities in the view of the promoters; but these people are seemingly set apart by Divine Providence, as an example to all mankind of the certainty of his judgment upon whole nations and countries.

Of such as change their religion, I must declare, I hold as mean an opinion as the Jews themselves, and must doubt their sincerity, as well as ability to judge of the right or wrong of the action. Neither am I so uncharitable as to think that no other mode of faith but my own can lead to heaven, and that these people, who are living monuments and remains of God's visible government upon the earth, need such a conversion from us. Their rigid tenacity in their own laws and customs, observed through every period of their dispersion, and in every place, under the most oppres sive governments, bespeaks a providential care visible in their conduct for ages past. Their diet, intermarriages, and burial, amongst themselves, are invincible barriers, I may say, to their coming over to our communion. These, and the constant obligation they hold to their Bye Laws, are strengthened by the acces sion of foreign Jews, who are still more severe in their discipline than those of England, who, from the liberty they enjoy, are more relaxed in their practice than the Foreigners. The existence of their Bye Laws has been doubted ; but I can assure your readers that they exist, and in full force, as I shall hereafter shew, in

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the report of a case in point, of which I have obtained leave, in order to shew your correspondents that such laws exist in full force, and supersede the application to ours. Their utmost punishment is 39 stripes, which may be pounds or shillings at the discretion of the rulers, and which they willingly pay rather than be righted in our Courts of Law, where their maxims would be ousted; but

then they would in such a case be denied being gathered with their fathers in their own burial-places, the power of which disposal is in the mandate of the Synagogue Chambers, which is a Star Chamber of despotism among these people.

This appears so great an advantage in their minds, that every other consideration gives place to it; and the poorest have some assurance of safety in that rest, if they can but raise the most trifling sum to secure it, even for their children. All this I can illustrate by recent example, and your permission for insertion. After all, and to conclude this long letter, which carries me not an inch further than I was at the conclusion of my second, I shall just observe, that I think the means observed by the Society to convert these people will never ac complish that work. It is a great un dertaking, and worthy the names of the first patriots and benevolents; but "beware of counterfeits, for such are abroad." Mr. Frey's Memoirs, published by himself, furnish no proof of abilities; but no prophet is esteemed in his own country, and the gentle man has travelled to this.

Every endeavour to do good deserves praise; but let us not go to work with too much assurance of success, lest we be found militating against the everlasting decrees of God, who has chosen them as vessels of honour as well as disgrace. I must now conclude this long desultory letter, written without method, and only to convince Perseverans and yourself of my most grateful respect for his candour and indulgence. Yours, &c. VINDICATION of the LONDON SOCIETY for promoting Christianity umong the Jews. (Concluded from page 534.) WILL now turn my attention to a person who signs himself" An

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HENRY LEMOINE.

Unconverted Jew," but whom I do not believe to be any Jew at all; my reason for this is, that he discovers more ignorance upon the subject than all your other writers put together: and further, that there are numbers of persons who are indeed sectaries of the very worst description, or more properly direct infidels, who are per petually writing under the feigned name and character of Jews. This gentleman begins with the opprobri ous term "Calvinistic Junta." Now I do not believe any Jew would use this term; few are acquainted with it; and if they understood it, there is no Jew would use it as a term of reproach. I shall take leave to under stand the term in its more ordinary acceptation, viz. as implying the doc trine of Predestination; does the Jew mean this? if not, what does he mean? Now I will first state to him what the late Bishop Horsley says upon the subject: "So far is it from the truth, that the Church of England is decidedly Arminian, and hostile to Calvinism, that the truth is this; that upon the principal points in dispute between the Arminians and the Calvinists, upon all the points of doctrine characteris tic of the two sects, the Church of England maintains an absolute neutrality. The Articles explicitly assert nothing but what is believed both by Arminians and Calvinists. The Caf vinists indeed hold some opinions relative to the same points, which the Church of England has not gone the length of asserting in her Articles, but neither has she gone the length of explicitly contradicting those opinions; insomuch, that there is nothing to hinder the Arminian and the highest supralapsarian Calvinist from walking together in the Church of England and Ireland, as friends and brothers, if they both approve the discipline of the Church, and both are willing to submit to it. Her discipline has been approved; it has been submitted to; it has been in former times most ably and ze lously defended by the highest supralapsarian Calvinists. Such was the great Usher! such was Whitgift! such were many more burning and shining lights of our Church in her early days, when first she shook off the Papal tyranny, long since gone to the resting-place of the spirits of the just.

"Any one may hold all the theological