nal reredos which are so beautiful that they take
away our breath--that broken statue of the Madonna and Child, for
instance, perhaps the loveliest piece of fourteenth century sculpture
to be found in England. No, however we consider the great church of
Winchester, it stands alone. As a mere building it is more tremendous
and more venerable than anything now left to us upon English soil; as a
burial place it possesses the dust not only of the Apostle of the heart
of England but of the greatest of the Saxon kings, while beneath its
mighty vault William Rufus sleeps, the only Norman king that lies in
England. And as a shrine of art it still possesses incomparable things.
It stands there as the Pyramids stand in the desert, a relic of a lost
civilisation; but by it we may measure the modern world.

It is, too, when you consider it, utterly lonely. The revolution we
call the Reformation upon which the modern world turns and turns as
upon a pivot, while it spared Winchester Cathedral, though reluctantly,
swept away all the buildings which surrounded it. The great monastery
is gone, scarcely a sign of it remains. Nothing at all is left of the
famous nunnery of St Mary. Of Wolvesey Castle there are a few beautiful
ruins, of Hyde Abbey, all has been swept away, even the stones, even
the bones of Alfred. Nor have the other and later religious houses,
with which Winchester was full, fared better. It is difficult to find
even the sites of the houses of the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the
Austin Friars, the Carmelites. And what remains of the College of St
Elizabeth, and, but for a Norman doorway, now in Catholic hands, of the
Hospital of St Mary Magdalen? Only the Hospital of St John remains at
the east end of the High Street, still in possession of its fine Hall and
Chapel, and the great school founded by William of Wykeham in 1382,
"for seventy poor and needy scholars and clerks living college-wise in
the same, studying and becoming proficient in grammaticals or the art
and science of grammar." It remains without compare, the oldest and the
greatest school in England, whose daughter is Eton and whose late
descendant is Harrow.

To say that the Cathedral, the College and the Hospital of St John are
all that remains of mediaeval Winchester would not, perhaps, be
strictly true; but it is so near the truth that one might say it
without fear of contradiction. Most of the old churches even have
perished. There remain St John Baptist