dows." The restorers have gilded the bosses, but
the space between the ribs is smoothed in a way that gives the
appearance of there being no masonry in the construction. One can
hardly judge the ceiling, therefore, by its present appearance, which
is not further improved by the green wash with which some of the
clerestory windows are covered.

The general appearance of the choir suffers pitiably from the
ill-advised restoration of 1848 and the following years. Before that
time its aspect must have been curious and encumbered; but the
judicious removal of the pews and galleries, and the restoration of
the truncated oak canopies of the stalls, would have made matters
right at a small cost, and without the destruction of any old
woodwork. As it was, everything was ruthlessly swept away. The
tabernacled stalls, which eighteenth-century vandalism had respected,
vanished utterly before the restoring mania of the Gothic revivalist,
even their traditional position and order being changed.

The result is just what might have been expected. The place has been
completely modernised. Chilly stone canopies cover the stalls; they
are of the kind of workmanship which forty years ago was considered
excellent. That is to say, they are covered with frigid, ungainly, and
pompous ornament, cut with mechanical regularity, and without one
trace of feeling or one line of beauty from beginning to end. Below,
and between them, the choir is encumbered, much as it was before 1848,
with rows of stalls, which are continued in the presbytery almost up
to the tawdry brass altar-rails. Two more pale ghosts of medieval art
front each other in complacent parody of the work their makers could
not even copy--the pulpit and the bishop's throne. The former is Early
Victorian; the latter is worse, it is a restoration of Perpendicular
work so relentless that not a sign of the original conception remains.
Plate-glass fills the tracery at the sides, and the door is a piece of
solid swinging stone. On the completion of this terrible work, the
restorers seem to have felt dimly the want of colour, which previously
had been so abundant. They therefore proceeded to furnish with that
peculiar musty red which used to cast a gloom over our childhood--red
cushions on the seats, red cushions on the desks, red hassocks on the
floor, red edges to the books, hot red in the bishop's throne, dull
red on the altar, before the altar, and behind the altar, it is all
red but th