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INTERIOR OF CLERE-STORY WINDOW, NORTH TRANSEPT.

of simulated windows. Three porches exist, but they are much too small for the artistic or the expressional dignity which their place demands. It hardly needs the corroborating evidence of the great porch on the north side of the church to make them seem a mere concession to the precepts of tradition or of foreign practice; and the façade as a whole is palpably an attempt to imitate under hopeless conditions the majestic variety of French designs. It is not a true factor in the general scheme of the building, truly completing the parts which lie behind it. It is a screen whose purpose is to make the church look larger than the truth. From one point of view it accomplishes this task, but from every other the cheat is of course apparent. Strictly judged for the underlying architectural idea, it has no greater merit than a thing we may see any day in any little American town a house-front a couple of stories in height surmounted by another sham story or two of blank wall, behind which, when we stand a little aside, we see the roofs sloping away. They were a singular race, these English architects. Sometimes they seem to possess, in the highest measure, constructive genius, architectural imagination, æsthetic feeling; sometimes they design like children who have been impressed by a certain object but have no appreciation of what factors really make its beauty; and sometimes they show both phases of their character in the same building and at the same epoch. Such is strikingly the case at Salisbury. The east end, the tower and spire, and the long reaches of nave and transepts look like the work of angel builders inspired by a supernal idea to a supernatural perfection of result, while the west front-built by the same men, or at least by their sons shows a lack of the first principles of good art which we should condemn in a generation that had been fed on blunders only. Yet the result is as characteristically

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English in the one case as in the other. Neither for the supreme success nor for the crude mistake was there any foreign precedent.

The more we look at this façade the more its faults as a design appear, though there is much to delight us in its details of execution. The wings are too wide for the central division, and the middle window is too large for its place; the cornices are deplorably weak, and the rows of blank windows are a cheap device to give the wall a semblance of utility. It is less to be called a composition than a mechanical assemblage of individually attractive features. But it is far more elaborate than any other part of the church, and must at least have had great decorative charm when its multitudinous figures were intact. Time and the Reformation ruined them however, and the modern hand which replaced them was not a great sculptor's.

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VI.

IT is a pleasure to turn from the front of Salisbury to the tower and spire, which call for nothing but unstinted praise. The upper parts are just a century later than the lower and belong to the Decorated period. But appropriate proportioning has been observed in the shape of the windows, and the richer decoration seems entirely harmonious with the simplicity below. The tower groups and assorts with the body of the church as a blown rose groups and assorts with buds - it seems but the same idea brought to a richer, fuller development. And the work is as intrinsically beautiful as it is appropriate. Not size alone makes this steeple so famous; not merely the lowness of the roof beneath makes it so splendidly impressive. No other spire in the world is so exquisitely noble in proportions, so aspiring in expression, so graceful in outline, so felicitous in the arrangement of its parts. The angle-turrets are of just the right size, the stories of the tower and the bandings of the spire are of just the right height, the transition from tower to spire-from the four-sided to the eight-sided body-is beautifully managed, and the decoration is applied so well that we cannot dissever it in thought from the constructive forms it accents. Salisbury's spire has few rivals in the world and, to my mind, no equal. The far greater elaboration of Strasburg's is dearly purchased by a loss of purity in outline and of buoyancy of spring. The same is true with even greater emphasis of Antwerp's and of Mechlin's, whence the spire-like effect has almost entirely vanished. If the open lace-work of Freiburg's great pinnacle has a greater picturesqueness, we may still prefer the solid, pure, and noble slightness of the great English work; and in all of Europe there is no

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other spire of similar altitude and beauty which stands like this as the completing central feature of a great and perfect composition.

It is supposed that the builders of the church intended to carry their tower much higher than the single stage they completed. But their foundations, set on spongy soil, showed signs of weakness, and the recent fall of the great neighboring tower of Winchester warned against temerity. Strong abutments were added in the upper stages of the church, and by the aid of these the fourteenth-century architect raised his upper stories and his spire. The construction of the latter is singularly daring and scientific. To a height of twenty feet its walls are two feet thick, but above that they are only nine inches thick, while the scaffoldings which served the builders still remain within them, hung to the capstone of the spire by iron rods and serving by their crossbars to brace the fabric. But even thus the soil refused to bear the enormous load with steadiness, and in the fifteenth century great braces were inserted between the four supporting piers to prevent them from bulging outward to their fall. The point of the spire is now twenty-three inches out of the perpen

dicular, but the fact is scarcely perceptible; and though signs of settlement show far more plainly within the church, they have not increased for centuries, while modern skill has done its best to guard against further movement. It is probable that the original constructors did not think of adding so lofty a finish to their tower; but their successors' thought was a happy one and, as time has proved, it was not altogether over-daring.

VII.

THE interior of the cathedral, despite its size and unity, impresses and charms us much less than the exterior. The features of its design please us best when individually considered. The plan of the great pillars is a welding together of eight circular shafts, four of larger and four of smaller size. The arches between them are sharply pointed and their moldings show that infinitude of beautifully contrasting hollows, ridges, and rolls which is the distinctive mark and the greatest merit of EarlyEnglish work. The clere-story openings are divided into coupled lights and filled with simple, strong, yet graceful traceries; and the triforium lights are in groups of three or five.

Each story is beautiful in itself, but there is no intimate connection between them. They are superimposed but not connected. Even in

round-arched Norman work, where no air of consistent aspiration is expected, the effect is best when certain members rise in unbroken lines from floor to roof, uniting all parts of the design. But here, where they are far more essential, there are no such members. Each range of openings is designed in independence of the others, and the sharply pointed forms do not agree in expression with the strong horizontal demarcations thus produced the eye is bidden continually to change from vertical to level lines, and neither an idea of rest nor an idea of aspiration is made clear. The roof, moreover, begins its curve so low down upon the walls as to have an almost crushing effect; seen in their long sequence, the features which individually are so charming look somewhat thin and "wire-drawn"; and the entire lack of sculptured decoration seems here a fault, though it seemed no fault outside. Early-English builders could decorate most lavishly when they chose, and one type of capital which they used is extremely rich and lovely. But another type consisted simply of a succession of plain moldings, and it is this alone that we find at Salisbury. Of course the effect must have been very different when the church was first constructed. Then all the untraceried windows, which now look so poor and throw so cold a glare, were filled with gorgeous low-toned glass, and the stonework throughout was brought into harmony by paint. But as we see it to-day, an architectural scheme reduced to its intrinsic terms, the nave of Salisbury leaves us a little indifferent. The choir is more attractive, for its

furnishings enrich the general effect and the design of its east end is extremely fine. Three tall arches, the outer ones of very slender shape, are surmounted by a group of five lancet windows and again by another group of five. This is the end wall of the choir proper, and the upper ranges of windows look out over lower roofs and are filled with glass. But through the great arches beneath them we look under these low roofs into the retrochoir and Lady - Chapel, where slender, isolated shafts make exquisite perspectives, changing in effect with every changing step. These outlying chapels, seen thus as through a triple frame, are the English substitute for the circling apses of the Continent. The prize for picturesqueness, poetry, and mystery must be given to France, but England's device is as charming in a simpler, clearer way; and, I may say once more, there is less need for comparisons in a case like this than for gratitude that different lands show different ideals in perfect execution and not merely variants of the same kind of success.

The monuments which filled the choir and nave of Salisbury were sadly knocked about and mutilated and shifted in Protestant years, and when the "restorer " Wyatt took them in hand a century ago he re-arranged many of them after a scheme of his own. The columns of the nave are united by a low continuous plinth, prescribed, perhaps, for the better distribution of their weight, by the treacherous nature of the soil. Upon this plinth, between the pillars, Wyatt arranged a sequence of monuments. Of course their historic interest is destroyed, yet the effect, superficially speaking, is not bad, and if Wyatt had done nothing worse than this we might perhaps forgive him. How can we forgive him for shattering the ancient windows and throwing their glass "by cart-loads into a ditch"? Some remaining fragments have been patched together in two or three of the windows, but we must go to the cathedral of York to see what we might have seen at Salisbury had it not been for reformers and restorers. A multitude of tombs still remain in the choir and Lady-Chapelold and modern, large and small, simple and elaborate. Among them is one which is supposed to commemorate Bishop Roger and to

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have been brought from Old Sarum, and another in which lies a woman whom a poet's lines, more imperishable than brass or stone, have made forever famous "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother."

The great old choir-screen, as in so many other English churches, has been removed, and the eye now passes without hindrance from one end of the mighty perspective to the other. Or, more exactly, it would thus pass but for the huge braces that were built in the fifteenth century between the piers which support the tower. Each is formed by a strong, low arch surmounted by a straight, beam-like piece of wall. The huge original openings are thus divided, so to say, into two open stories, and the Perpendicular decoration on the lower story strikes the only note of discord in the vast architectural unity of the church. The device was constructionally clever, and doubtless was the best that could have been adopted, but the necessity for its adoption was unfortunate.

VIII.

CHAPTER-HOUSE and cloisters, like the church itself, are complete to-day as at first constructed, and they too are in the EarlyEnglish style. They were built just after the church was finished and resemble the west VOL. XXXV.-96.

façade, being richer in feature and detail than the nave against the south side of which they lie. Every cathedral chapter needed, of course, a chapter-house for its assemblings; but only monastic establishments needed cloister-walks for the daily recreation of the monks who led their lives in common. Salisbury's chapter was always collegiate, and its cloisters, therefore, were a pure piece of architectural luxury. The fact speaks very plainly through the absence of other monastic structures. Nothing more than we see to-day ever stood at Salisbury except a lofty bell-tower on the north side of the churchyard. It was "multangular in form, surmounted by a leaden spire; with walls and buttresses similar to the chapter-house and cloisters, and a single pillar of Purbeck marble in the center, supporting the bells and spire." It was destroyed by Wyatt, apparently for no reason, but with full consent of dean and chapter.

The cloisters, with their coupled windows, simple traceries, and groined roofs are very beautiful, and the priests well gave the name of "Paradise" to the central square of turf with its group of dusky cedars. The chapterhouse is of the typical English form - an octagon with great windows filling the space between its buttresses, and an overarching roof borne by a central column. Yet it does not charm us quite so much as some of the

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