nsistent and
tragic manner, the whole human interest of _Edwin Drood_ almost as much
as Notre Dame overshadows the human interest in Victor Hugo's romance,
preserves some remains of the original Saxon and Norman churches on the
site of which it was erected. Its Early English and Decorated Gothic
came off lightly from three restorations, but the tower is
nineteenth-century vandalism. The Norman west front enshrines in the
riches of its sculptured portal, with its five receding arches, figures
of the Saviour and his twelve apostles, and on two shafts are carved
likenesses of Henry I and his Queen. Freeman has pronounced it to be far
the finest example of Norman architecture of its kind. The Chapter House
door, a magnificent example of Decorated Gothic, is adorned with
effigies representing the Christian and Jewish Churches, which are
surrounded by Holy Fathers and Angels who pray for the soul,
emblematically represented as a small nude form above them. But it is
about the stone-vaulted crypt, where even by daylight "the heavy pillars
which support the roof engender masses of black shade", with "lanes of
light" between, and about the winding staircase and belfry of the great
tower that the spells of the Dickens magic especially cling, and Jasper
and Durdles revisit these haunts by the glimpses of the moon as
persistently as Quasimodo and the sinister Priest beset with their
ghostly presences the belfry of the great Paris minster.

Of the historic imagination Dickens had little or none. He could not
evoke, and never had the faintest desire to evoke, a Past that was
divided from the Present by an unbridgeable chasm. Thus Rochester
Castle, though he seldom failed to bring his guests to view it,
affected him only with a remote sense of antiquity such as he would have
experienced, no more and no less, amongst the Pyramids. But he was
keenly sensitive to the influences of a Past which still survived and,
by the continuity of a corporate life, made an integral part in the
Present. The Cathedral life, in which by virtue of their office canons
and dean were living relics of antiquity, and as much the contemporaries
as the successors of the ecclesiastics who lay crumbling in the crypt,
stirred this sense in him as it had been stirred by the ancient Inns of
London. Almost the last words that he wrote were a tribute to the beauty
of the venerable fane in which, beneath the monument of the founder of
that quaint Charity rendered so fam