, which can boast of Transitional
arcades, and fifteenth century screen and pulpit; St Maurice with a
Norman doorway; St Peter with its twelfth and thirteenth century work;
St Bartholomew with some Norman remains near the site of Hyde Abbey;
and in the High Street there is more than one fine old house. The fact
that so little remains cannot altogether be placed to the discredit of
the Reformation and the Puritan fanatics. Until the eighteenth century
something remained of Hyde Abbey, much of the Hospital of St Mary
Magdalen; the city walls were then practically perfect, having all
their five gates, north, south, east and west, and King's gate; now of
all these only the Westgate of the thirteenth century remains to us
with the King's gate over which is the little church of St Swithin.

But in spite of vandalism, forgetfulness and barbarism, often of the
worst description as in the mere indifference and ignorance that
scattered Alfred's bones, no one has ever come to Winchester without
loving it, no one has ever been glad to get away. Its innumerable
visitors are all its lovers and the most opposite temperaments find
here common ground at last. Walpole praises it, and so does Keats. "We
removed here," writes the latter in 1819 to Bailey, "for the
convenience of a library, and find it an exceedingly pleasant town,
enriched with a beautiful cathedral and surrounded by fresh-looking
country.... Within these two months I have written fifteen hundred
lines, most of which, besides many more of prior composition, you will
probably see next winter. I have written two tales, one from Boccaccio
called the 'Pot of Basil' and another called 'St Agnes Eve' on a
popular superstition, and a third called 'Lamia' (half-finished). I
have also been writing parts of my 'Hyperion,' and completed four acts
of a tragedy."

"This Winchester," he writes again, "is a place tolerably well suited
to me. There is a fine cathedral, a college, a Roman Catholic chapel
... and there is not one loom or anything like manufacturing beyond
bread and butter in the whole city. There are a number of rich
Catholics in the place. It is a respectable, ancient, aristocratic
place, and moreover it contains a nunnery." "I take a walk," he writes
to his family, "every day for an hour before dinner, and this is
generally my walk; I go out the back gate, across one street into the
cathedral yard, which is always interesting; there I pass under the
trees along a paved