proper are of admirable workmanship and striking effect. The altarscreen is likewise of the Decorated period, although painfully restored. The blank arcades in the aisles seem surprisingly rich, even after one has seen those in the "Nine Altars" at Durham. The minor transepts are shut off from the choir by tall screens of iron tracery, lovely and yet vigorous as only hammered iron-work can be. Architectural carving is everywhere profuse and usually of the greatest beauty, and the figures in the triforium spandrels, which have given the Angel Choir its popular name, are of unique importance in English interior decoration. The effect of all this lavish adornment is greatly increased by the diversified plan of the structure, which at every step gives varying lights and shadows, new combinations of form, fresh perspectives with fresh accords and contrasts; and altogether the east-limb of Lincoln dwells in my mind as

more richly pictorial in aspect than any part of any other English cathedral. Of course the mood of the moment has much to do with imprinting such impressions; yet I venture to record this one with the claim that it cannot be very far away from the truth.

VII.

BUT it is only when we pass outside the church again and make its mighty circuit that the full value of its complex plan and its rich adornment is made clear. I would not say that Lincoln is the most beautiful of English cathedrals inside. I am not quite sure that it is the most impressive outside when seen from a distance. But I am certain that it is the most beautiful and the most interesting outside when studied foot by foot under the shadow of its walls. It is more varied in outline and

LINCOLNY 1886

THE SOUTH-EAST PORCH.

feature than Canterbury itself, and it is vastly more ornate.

Even the west-front is extraordinarily interesting in detail, especially in its Norman portions; and when we turn its southern shoulder, beauty and charm increase at every step. First we see the flanks of the Norman towers and on a line with them the low EarlyEnglish chapels; and then, set considerably back, the long stretch of the nave with lancetwindows and graceful flying-buttresses, a delicate arcade above the clerestory, and over this an open parapet bearing great canopied niches of the Decorated period. Then comes the side of the transept with the Galileeporch in bold projection-richly shafted, exquisitely vaulted, and peculiar by reason of its cruciform plan; then the transept-end where the Bishop's Eye looks out beneath a lofty gable; then a deep and shadowy re

thus eastward from the earlier to the later work; and here in this south-eastern porch the climax is reached. There is no other large porch in a similar situation in England, and, I think, no porch at all which is so ornate in design.

Nor is there any falling off in beauty of general effect when we turn to the northward and view the east-end of the church and the polygonal chapter-house beyond. We may prefer the treatment of some other east-end, granting that here the upper window (which lights the space between the vaulting and the high-pitched outer roof) is so large that it injures the effect of the principal window, and that the aisle-gables are shams, representing nothing behind them; and we may prefer the

Low as are the vaulted ceilings of Lincoln, its outer roofs, in the six great arms formed by nave and choir and doubled transepts, are unusually high and steep; and, beautifully supported by the lesser roofs - lower in varying degree of the many chapels, aisles, and porches, they as beautifully support the three tall towers. Far off to the westward rise the sturdy Norman pair with their delicate earlyPerpendicular tops, harmonizing well with their greater brother- that central tower which is the crown in beauty as in constructional importance of the whole splendid pile. This late-Decorated central tower of Lincoln has but one real rival - the Perpendicular central tower of Canterbury. Built to bear a lofty wooden spire, while the Canterbury tower

was meant to be spireless from the first, it is nevertheless almost as fine in form, almost as superbly complete in its present spireless state, while in loveliness of feature and enrichment it is beyond compare.

VIII.

THERE is no such wide-spreading Close around Lincoln as around most English cathedrals, yet even here a green environment does not lack. Along the south side of the church runs a border of grass with a street beyond it, and the low walls of the Vicar's Court, flanked by ecclesiastical houses. To the eastward the grass stretches out into a wide lawn, again with a street as its boundary; and to the northward chapter-house and cloisters look on a still broader reach of turf.

The cloisters were from the first almost as purely ornamental, as little required by actual needs, as they are to-day; for there was never a monastic chapter at Lincoln. But whatever the chapter, a house for its councils was required; and a singularly beautiful one was built by the canons of Lincoln. It is decagonal in shape and about sixty feet in diameter, with a complex vault supported by a central pillar, from which the ribs diverge like palmbranches from a palm. There are other chapter-houses which resemble it in general design -as at Salisbury, Wells, and Westminster; but to my mind there is no other so perfect. Its proportions are faultless and the sweep of its ceiling is graceful beyond words. The central pier, with its circle of ten isolated marble shafts; the sharply pointed blank arcade, which surrounds its walls above the stone benches; the lancet windows, which in groups of two fill every face except the one that opens by its whole width into the stately vestibule; the rich vaulting-shafts, which rise between smaller blank lancets in every angle all are perfect in themselves and in perfect harmony, in close architectural union, with each other. Whatever may be the case in their larger constructions, no one ever surpassed the English in constructions such as this. There is nothing lovelier in the world than this little interior, and there is nothing better as a work of Gothic art. From the mere position of chapter-house and cloisters we might almost feel sure that they were not built as parts of a great monastic establishment, for in such an establishment their proper place would have been on the south side of the nave. Three sides of the cloisters still stand in their original Decorated form; but the north side, with the library above, was burned in the seventeenth century and was reconstructed by Sir Christopher Wren. Of course this piece of Renaissance work is out VOL. XXXVI.-83.

of keeping with all else, yet it is not wholly unwelcome, for it adds to the historic interest of a richly historic spot. Where these cloisters stand once ran the wall of the Roman station, and within them are preserved fragments of a tessellated Roman floor. Beginning, therefore, with these fragments, running the eye over the huge, near body of the church, and then coming back to Sir Christopher's walls, we find signs and symbols of almost all the generations which make England's glory when she counts her treasures of art. There is but one great gap- no sign or token appears of that sturdy race of English builders who had their Church of Mary on this same spot between the going of the Roman and the coming of the Norman. "Saxons" or "Anglo-Saxons" these builders are popularly called, but they were the first Englishmen, the men of true, undiluted English blood. And if names were always applied in accordance with facts, the name of "EarlyEnglish architecture" would be given to their primitive round-arched work, and not to the Lancet-Pointed work of those thirteenth-century Englishmen whose blood was tinged with a Norman strain.

IX.

BUT if no relics of the first phase of English art remain in or about Lincoln Cathedral, down in the town of Lincoln we may find them. Here stand two tall church-towers, built in that primitive round-arched style which had once been used by all western Europe, which before the Conquest the Norman had already altered into another roundarched style of quite different aspect, but which the German was still employing. In Germany it was never abandoned-only developed until it was exchanged for the Pointed style of France. But in England it was at once suppressed by the conquerors' style, and not out of it but out of the Norman style grew the Early-English Pointed. Here at Lincoln we may be almost sure that we see its last gasp for life; for these towers were built by an English colony from the upper town after the architects from over-sea had there begun the great cathedral-church.

Nor are these the only relics of remote antiquity in the low valley and steep, climbing streets of Lincoln. The trace of the Roman is everywhere; not merely in excavated bits of pavement and carving, but in the great "Newport Gate" near castle and church, in the line of the far-stretching highways, in the twelve miles of "Foss Dyke" which, connecting the Witham with the Trent, still serve the purposes of commerce. And the trace of the Norman is still more plainly seen; not only in his hill-top church and castle, but in

several dwellings on the hill-side streets. All of these are yet in use and one of them still keeps, in its name of the "Jew's house," a record of the fact that few but Jews were able in the twelfth century to dwell in habitations of hewn and carven stone. Timbers sheltered the Christian citizen; only God and his priests and the Hebrew pariah could afford the costlier material.

The Jews, in truth, played as conspicuous and at times as martyr-like a rôle in medieval Lincoln as in medieval York. It would be interesting to tell of their dramatic persecution in the fourteenth century were there not in Lincoln's history so many chapters of still greater significance, and had not the architectural chapter been so long in the telling. The diocese was an immense one, even after the Normans set off Cambridgeshire to form the diocese of Ely, for besides its present territory it included, until Reformation times, what are now the sees of Peterborough and Oxford; and the size and strength of the episcopal city, and its situation in the center of England on the high road to the north, helped to insure the permanence of its early renown. Whether we look at its burghers' record or its bishops', there is never an age when great names and deeds are wanting.

Here, for example, King Stephen was defeated and imprisoned in 1141; here was a focus of conflict in the critical reign of King John, and again in the early tempestuous years of King Henry III.; here was a Royalist defense, a Parliamentary siege and triumph, in 1644; and always the burghers as a body were more influential actors than has often been the case on English soil.

Among the bishops who here held sway. was first Remigius, the cathedral founder; then Robert Bloet, the chancellor of William Rufus, who was called akin in nature to his patron and thought to be rightly punished when "his sowle, with other walking spretes," was compelled to haunt the cathedral aisles; then Alexander, who repaired the church of Remigius, and, although "called a bishop, was a man of vast pomp and great boldness and audacity," and "gave himself up to military affairs" in the wars of Stephen. Then, after a long interregnum, came one who was never consecrated but enjoyed the temporalities of the see for seven years-Geoffrey Plantagenet, the illegitimate son of Henry II. From 1186 to 1200 ruled St. Hugh, the builder -perfect, we are told, in his daily life, and a model bishop before the world. Another Hugh, who came from Wells, soon followed him, and then in 1235, Robert Grosseteste, than whom no man of his time was more remarkable in himself or more conspicuously be

fore the nation. a scholar, a builder, a stern disciplinarian in his diocese, and a bold-fronted upholder of the rights of the English Church against the king on the one hand and the pope on the other. Thus the list runs on, often a great name, never a quite inconspicuous one, until in the year 1395 we reach Henry Beaufort, afterwards Bishop of Winchester and Cardinal of Rome, immortalized in a rather unjust light by Shakspere's hand. He was followed by Philip of Repington, at first an outspoken Wickliffite, then a truckling recanter, and, in consequence, a man whom princes delighted to honor; and he by Richard Fleming, who was the executive of the Roman Church in that act of the results of which the poet says:

The Avon to the Severn runs,
The Severn to the sea;

And Wickliffe's dust shall spread abroad,
Wide as the waters be.

Here at Lincoln, coming from the chair of Rochester, sat John Russell, who played an important political part just before Henry VII. gained the throne; and here for a twelvemonth ere he went to York and became a cardinal, Henry VIII.'s ill-used great servant, Wolsey. After the Reformation, bishops of political fame everywhere grew fewer, but Lincoln's succession kept well to the front in the more peaceful walks of intellectual life, and furnished many archbishops to the neighboring chair at York. An honored name occurs in our own day-the name of Christopher Wordsworth, who was first canon and archdeacon at Westminster, and died as Bishop of Lincoln in 1885.

X.

THE South side of Lincoln, wrote Fuller, in his "Worthies" many generations since, "meets the travelers thereunto twenty miles off, so that their eyes are there many hours before their feet." We count by minutes now where Fuller counted by hours; yet they must be dull eyes to which Lincoln does not speak with entrancing power as the railroad crosses the flat wolds towards the base of the roofpiled hill, as they see it ever nearer and nearer, tremendously crowned yet not crushed by its three-towered church, until the encircling river is in the immediate foreground, until at last the church shows paramount as the rail is left and the steep and twisting streets are climbed.

Upon second thoughts I am inclined to say in very positive fashion that when thus beheld, and not only when beheld quite near at hand, Lincoln shows the finest exterior in England. Certainly Durham, apart from its environment, is not its peer, and Durham is

its only rival in dignity of site. Durham, intrinsically, is grand, majestic, and imposing; but Lincoln is all this and very beautiful as well. No other cathedral has so strong yet graceful a skyline, and no other so fine a group of spireless towers. Individually each tower may be surpassed elsewhere, but all three together they are matchless. Not even the knowledge that they once bore spires which now are gone hurts their air of perfect fitness to the church they finish and the site they crown. And as to sites, while Durham is made more picturesque by the trees about it and the castle walls beside it, Lincoln's loftier perch and closer union with the town give it the nobler look. But comparisons are futile. Durham stands superbly in front of its city; Lincoln stands superbly above its city; each is unparalleled in its way, and it is hopeless to determine which way is really finer.

Of course with such a cathedral one need

not pick one's point of view; the difficulty would be to find a place above the horizon whence the church of Lincoln could not be well seen. But to my mind there is one point of view from which it is almost better worth seeing than from very near or from very far. This is from the Vicar's Court — a beautiful walled garden sloping down the hill to the southward of the choir. Seen from here in summer, a mass of trees conceals the greater part of the long body; but the tall transeptfronts show clearly, and the roof-lines, and above them the great tower at just the right distance for appreciating its majesty of form and its loveliness of decoration.

Almost all the old ecclesiastical dwellings have disappeared except for frequent fragments built into newer walls. But we scarcely regard their absence, Lincoln the church and Lincoln the secular town have so much else to show us in so many shapes and styles.

M. G. van Rensselaer.

General Lee's Views on Enlisting the Negroes.

[THE subjoined letters, which contain their own explanation, are sent to us through the Hon. W. L. Wilson, M. C., by the Hon. Andrew Hunter, of Charlestown, West Virginia, who assures us that they have not before appeared in print.- EDITOR.]

RICHMOND, January 7, 1865.

TO GENERAL R. E. LEE. DEAR GENERAL: I regret that in the succession of stirring events since the commencement of the present war I have had so little opportunity to renew our former, to me at least, exceedingly agreeable acquaintance, and particularly that I have so rarely, if ever, met with a suitable occasion to interchange views with you upon the important public questions which have been and are still pressing on us with such intense interest. It would have demanded, indeed, in view of the scarcely less than awful weight of care and responsibility Providence and your country have thrown upon you, and which you will pardon me for saying has been grandly met, no ordinarily favorable opportunity to have induced me to intrude upon your over-burdened time and attention for such a purpose; and in approaching you now, in this form, upon a subject which I deem of vital importance, I offer no other apology than the momentous character of the issue fixed upon the hearts and minds of every Southern patriot. I refer to the great question now stirring the public mind as to the expediency and propriety of bringing to bear against our relentless enemy the element of military strength supposed to be found in our negro population; in other words, and more precisely, the wisdom and sound policy, under existing circumstances, of converting such portions of this popula

tion as may be required into soldiers, to aid in maintaining our great struggle for independence and national existence.

The subject is one which recent events have forced upon our attention with intense interest, and in my judgment we ought not longer to defer its solution; and although the President in his late annual message has brought it to the attention of Congress, it is manifestly a subject in which the several States of the Confederacy must and ought to act the most prominent part, both in giving the question its proper solution and in carrying out any plans that he may devise on the subject. As a member of the Virginia Senate, having to act upon the subject, I have given it much earnest and anxious reflection, and I do not hesitate to say here, in advance of the full discussion which it will doubtless undergo, that the general objections to the proposition itself, as well as the practical difficulties in the way of carrying it out, have been greatly lessened as I have more thoroughly examined them. But it is not to be disguised that public sentiment is greatly divided on the subject; and besides many real objections, a mountain of prejudice growing out of our ancient modes of regarding the institution of Southern slavery will have to be met and overcome, before we can attain to anything like that degree of unanimity so extremely desirable in this and all else connected with our great struggle. In our former contest for liberty and independence, he who was then at the head of our armies, and who became the Father of his Country, did not hesitate to give his advice on all great subjects involving the success of that contest and the safety and welfare of his country, and in so doing perhaps rendered more essential service than he did in the field; nor do I perceive why, upon such a subject and in such a crisis as the present, we should not have the benefit