der and fairylike, as at Cirencester, or St. Cuthbert's Wells. Wherever it is found it is graceful, racial, comfortable and full of infinite charm.

Towards the end, i.e., just before the Reformation, it began to lose its balance in ecclesiastical work, and to strain itself for impossible effects. The stone masons were too clever, and they tortured the logical and splendid fan vaults of Sherborne and Gloucester into extraordinary forms where vault-ribs thrust themselves through the vaults and great stone pendentives hung down like stalactites in defiance of all physical laws. They were daring and beautiful, but somehow one feels they ought not to have been done. Quite different were the wonderful wooden roofs which were the joiners' triumph and remain the artists' delight. The great roof of Westminster Hall in London is a masterpiece, but actually no more so than the hundreds of more modest roofs of the parish churches, wonderful in workmanship, carved and painted and gilded, and as rich in fancy as the Arab ceilings of Sicily and Spain. Of course this was also the heyday of the craftsman in wood-work of every kind stalls, pulpits, screens and before what has been called the "Great Pillage" it must have been almost impossible to see the interiors of the churches on account of the wealth of woodwork. Every county had its own school, but none came before those of Devonshire, Somerset and Cornwall. Much still remains, but we know from the records that during the suppression of the monasteries, the Edwardian and Elizabethian tyrannies and the Puritan cataclysm, fifty times as much perished utterly, and the mind is staggered by the effort to comprehend how it all could have been produced, and what England must have looked like, say, during the first years of the reign of Henry VIII.

It was a great art, this last racial art of England, and it did not altogether die from natural causes. When the Ref ormation broke, good work was still being done, though not quite of the best. There are many half-finished churches,

chapels and towers in England, standing now as they were left when the last sorrowful workman was driven away. It could hardly have lasted much longer however, for faith was getting weaker and wealth more powerful. One thing did last for many years, and that was the established type of domestic architecture. Long after the time had come when churches were destroyed and gutted rather than built and beautified, the houses of the noble, the squire and the burgher maintained the established type. All through the sixteenth century this held good, and there is not an old village or parish in England that does not to this day bear witness to the singular native feeling for beauty that once was the birthright of an Englishman, and to the enduring quality of the style he at last had made his own.

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