a glimpse of the Royal
Martyr, the victim of the great families, as he passed from Hurst
Castle to Windsor and the scaffold in Whitehall. With the Restoration,
which was most gallantly welcomed in the old royal city, Charles II.
came to Winchester, and having been burnt out at Newmarket was,
according to Evelyn, "all the more earnest to render Winchester the
seat of his autumnal diversions for the future, designing a palace
there where the ancient castle stood.... The surveyor has already begun
the foundation for a palace estimated to cost L35,000...." But Charles
died too soon to finish this new house, which, it is said, Queen Anne
wished to complete, liking Winton well, but again death intervened.

In spite of these royal fancies, however, Winchester, which had
suffered badly in the plague of 1667, continued to decline in
importance and in population, and to depend more and more upon the two
great establishments which remained to it, the Cathedral, founded by
Kynegils in 635 and re-established under a new Protestant
administration in the sixteenth century, and the College of St Mary of
Winchester founded by William of Wykeham in connection with the College
of St Mary, Winton, in Oxford, called New College, for the education of
youth and the advancement of learning. Winchester is, of course, as it
ever has been, the county-town of Hampshire, but it still maintains
itself as it has done now these many years chiefly by reason of these
two great establishments.

Certainly to-day the traveller's earliest steps are turned towards
these two buildings, and first to that which is in its foundation near
eight hundred years the older--the Cathedral church once of St Swithin,
the Bishop and Confessor (852-863) and now since the Reformation of the
Holy Trinity.

To come out of the sloping High Street past the ancient city Cross,
through the narrow passage-way into the precincts, and to pass down
that great avenue of secular limes across the Close to the great porch
of the Cathedral, is to come by an incomparable approach to perhaps the
most noble and most venerable church left to us in England. The most
venerable--not I think the most beautiful. No one remembering the Abbey
of Westminster can claim that for it, and then, though it possesses the
noblest Norman work in England and the utmost splendour of the
Perpendicular, it lacks almost entirely and certainly the best of the
Early English. Its wonder lies in its size and its a