such lack of skill in the management of the chosen forms and features as would a want of harmony and proportion in the construction proper. And though this construction might have been ornamented into richer charm, its design, I say, could not have been improved upon unless the designer's ideal had been altered too. Nor should we forget that the want of sculptured detail was once supplied by ornament in color, covering every part of the vast interior.

Mere theoretic judgment tells us this, and we see it clearly proved in the western transept. Here the fundamental forms are the same, but their proportions are all changed. Doubtless the result seems much more charming to most modern eyes; but it should be recognized as the result of different aims, and, moreover, of their incomplete attainment. Here lightness, grace, delicacy, and the expression of altitude were desired, and these were things which could not be perfectly attained until the pointed arch should come and bring the chance for dominant vertical lines. So this work may in one sense be considered primitive, archaic, for it is tentative, not final. It is, in a word, anticipatory Gothic; but the earlier work is complete and perfect Norman.

Excepting only as regards the roof of the central alley. The aisles alone are vaulted; the broad middle space is covered with boards that now are slightly canted on either side, but once were flatly laid. Whether such a ceiling came by choice or by necessity, there can hardly be a modern eye to like it save for its historic interest. It still preserves its painted decoration from a very early though uncertain day,- small figure-designs enframed in lozenge-like patterns of black. When the walls were painted too, it wore, of course, a less painfully alien look than it does to-day, contrasted with the stony whiteness of everything below. But even then its woodenness must have been apparent, and must have seemed but a pauper finish to such gigantic strength of pier and arch and wall. And its flatness, giving too strong an emphasis to lateral dimensions, was out of harmony with all the rest. Only a huge and massive semicircular vault could have carried out the ideal the walls so perfectly express. Yet we cannot but believe that its own builders really found it satisfactory; for there is none of that preparation for a possible later vault which we almost invariably find when a great nave on the continent chances to be ceiled flat with wood. The great half-columns which rise between the arches are not vaulting-shafts, but run straight up to the ceiling without true capitals, and were evidently built to bear its rafters only.

VOL. XXXIV.-25.

V.

THE choir and transepts, as has been said, are earlier than the nave but essentially at one with it in their design. The transepts have a single aisle to the eastward and a painted wooden ceiling apparently even earlier than the nave's and still undisturbed in its first flatness.

The central alley of the choir was finished with a semicircular apse, but the aisles were stopped flat at the beginning of its curve. In Early-English days an independent chapel seems to have been thrown out at the end of each aisle; and in Perpendicular days the whole end was transformed, as our plan will show. Very boldly, yet beautifully, some nameless architect at the end of the fifteenth century met the need for more altar-accommodation at the east end of the church without destroying his Norman predecessor's work. Across the whole width of the church he built a single great undivided one-storied apartment, rising as high as the roof of the choir-aisles. The ends of these aisles were pulled down, giving free access and an open view from either side. But the central apse was left projecting into what, after a lapse of four centuries, is still called the "new building." It was partly remodeled in detail and overlaid with Perpendicular ornament; but the architect had too much confidence in the fundamental success of his scheme to care to obliterate all signs of his borrowings and piecings. A Norman string-course still remains amid the late details, and also many traces which the weather had made upon the wall while it was still an external wall, and even one or two of the iron fastenings which had held the shutters in the lower range of openings.

Seen from the interior of the choir, this lower range of openings is found to have had its arch-heads changed into pointed shapes and filled with a rich fringe of tracery, through which the eye passes to the elaborate "new building." But the two upper ranges rising above the roof of this still keep their round arches, though filled with tracery for the reception of glass. This remodeling is in the Decorated style, and was done some hundred years before the "new building" was itself constructed. And, indeed, there is no part of the church which does not show the trace of constant, persistent alterations of a similar kind. Art grew too vitally and vigorously in those ages for any generation to be quite content with what its forefathers had bequeathed. If nothing important remained to be built, there was always something which might be re-touched into harmony with current tastes. The development of glass was perhaps the most potent factor in

of stone. And often again we shall find similar evidence of how the English love of wood persisted even in those days when vaults had most clearly proved their greater charm and fitness.

TWO BAYS OF THE NAVE.

the work of never-ceasing change; but the mere desire for what was thought a better beauty played, too, a considerable rôle.

The "new building "is an extremely beautiful example of Perpendicular art in its construction and in its details as well as in the boldness, yet good sense, of its arrangement; and its lovely, daring fan-vault shows in most interesting contrast with the work of those early builders who scarce ventured upon vaults at all. But we are not yet on the true birthground of the Perpendicular style, and once more may pass it briefly over.

The ceiling of the choir is a rich fifteenthcentury vault; but, nevertheless, it is not built

VI.

THE exterior of the east end is wonderfully picturesque,with its light, low, square Perpendicular building crowned with a rich parapet and statues, and its old Norman apse raising two ponderous round-arched tiers above. And as thence we pass along the north side through the beautifully planted church-yard, we find a succession of pictures which will hardly be surpassed elsewhere. The west front, too, rises in superb isolation above the broad green close before it; and, if we stand farther off, in the market-place of the town, above a beautiful gateway built by the Normans but largely changed by later hands.

But it is only such near views as these which are really fine at Peterborough. The town lies flat, and gives but a flat site to the church; and the church is itself so low, and crowned with so stunted a central tower and so insignificant a group of western turrets, that from a distance it makes no very effective picture.

Two years ago, when our illustrations were drawn, it had no central tower whatever. The great man who made the portico was not the only Peterborough architect who thought more, or knew more, of effectiveness than of stability in building. The Norman tower was raised on such inadequate supports that, at least as early as the year 1300, it cried aloud for reconstruction. So it was taken down, and the substructure strengthened. The great arches which opened from the nave and the choir into the crossing were rebuilt in pointed shapes; and though their mates on either side above the transepts were left intact, pointed "bearing arches" were built solid into the superincumbent walls. Then a low tower was placed above them, with a wooden lantern, which was removed in the last century.

But during many recent years it had been known that the tower was again insecure. Its pillars were bent and bulging, and the arches of transepts and choir were visibly strained. To prevent such a catastrophe as befell the tower of Chichester cathedral not long ago, the whole work was again pulled down, and more completely than before. When I saw it in 1885 the great angle-piers with their four arches were again in place, having been rebuilt from the very rock beneath the church; the old stones, carefully kept and numbered, having been replaced with as much fidelity as entire firmness could permit.

Doubtless a shrinkage of the soil, consequent upon the draining of the adjacent fens, has contributed somewhat to that dislocation of the fabric which, even in the very ends of choir and transepts, is apparent to the most careless eye. But a great deal, too, must be laid to the account of their builders' want of thought or lack of knowledge. It was singular to hear how superficial had been the foundations of so vast a work; and singular to see how poor the actual substance of its apparently Titanic piers. Portions of the casing of the choir-piers had been removed for needful patching; and could one call these great architects" good builders" when a pier eleven feet in diameter, and bearing such tremendous weight, was seen to have but a nine-inch-thick skin of cut and cemented stone and a loose core of what hardly deserved a better name than rubbish? One could well credit one of the architects in charge of the repairs when

he said that, but for the extraordinary toughness of the white Barnack stone, the whole fabric must long ago have twisted, torn, and wrenched itself asunder.

And not only poor, but overdaring methods of construction had contributed to the insecurity of the tower. At Norwich the great anglepiers are 10 feet in diameter and 45 feet in height, and the arches between them have a span of 23; but at Peterborough this span is 35 feet, while the piers are 52 feet high, and only 7 in diameter.

VII.

It would be hard to exaggerate the wealth or the renown of this monastery during all those ages when it was popularly called the "Golden Borough." The pope had decreed that any "islander" who might be prevented from visiting St. Peter's at Rome could gain the same indulgence by visiting St. Peter's here; and so great in consequence grew the sanctity of the spot that all pilgrims, even though of royal blood, put off their shoes beneath the western gateway of the close. Many precious relics, too, the monastery owned,chief among them the famous "incorruptible" arm of St. Oswald, the Northumbrian king.

But the castigation of Reforming years was as signal as had been the reverence of Catholic generations. Henry left the church intact, divided up its revenues with the new cathedral chapter he established, and made its time-serving abbot the first bishop of the see. But the Cromwellites all but obliterated

the monastic buildings and all but ruined the church itself. Its splendid glass was entirely shattered, its great silver-mounted reredos was broken into fragments, and its monuments and carvings were mutilated or destroyed. The vast picture of Christ and the Apostles on the ceiling of the choir was used for target-practice, and the soldiers did their daily exercising in the nave. Even the actual fabric was attacked, and one arch of the portico pulled down.

Later this arch was rebuilt with the old stones, and the whole church was repaired. But repair meant partial ruin too. The church was patched and pieced with materials taken from the domestic structures; and even the beautiful Early-English lady-chapel which projected from the northern transept was destroyed to the same end.

Little remains within the church to give it an interest apart from its architectural interest proper. Yet one can still find two tombs that vividly bring back the past. Singularly enough they are the tombs of two famous women, both uncrowned queens-alike in their misfortunes, though most unlike in all besides. Mary Stuart was beheaded at Fotheringay, eleven miles west of Peterborough, and buried beneath the pavement of the south choir-aisle. As we stand over her empty grave she seems a more real figure than in the crowded mau

soleum at Westminster whither her son removed her disparted bones. The other tomb, beneath the flagging of the north choir-aisle, still holds its tenant,- Catherine of Aragon. Thanks to the Puritan, nothing does her honor save the simplest name and date upon the stone-unless, indeed, we may credit the tale which says that Henry raised the church to cathedral dignity in answer to her death-bed prayer that she might be given a monument fitting for a queen.

The monastic buildings once covered a space four times as great as that which was covered by the church itself. But scanty enough are the fragments which report of them. A splendid Early-English gateway gives access to the bishop's palace on the right hand of the western close as we approach. The dwelling itself is largely modernized, yet it is picturesque and keeps some portions of the old abbots' home. Opposite, across the close, built into the modern grammar-school, is a charming apse-all that remains of the Norman chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury. South of the church the cloisters are but fragmentary, many-dated ruins. The vast arches of the old infirmary stretch uselessly across a narrow path or are built, very usefully, into the walls of the canons' modern houses. And over a wide distance other fragments may be traced, with much interest when one is on the