e. The black of the newly polished marble shafts,
the dull green of other parts, with the red, green, and white of the
vaulting ribs, is more bizarre than beautiful. In regarding traces of
mediaeval colouring one often forgets that time has blended
harmoniously a scheme otherwise entirely crude, and to modern taste
unpleasing. How far in English instances this is emphasized by the
absence of rich hangings, carpets, vestments, and pictures, it is not
within our subject to inquire; but since such restoration of the
primitive colouring offends one less in churches that still preserve
the more ornate furniture of the Roman Ritual, it is at least a moot
point.

The triple lancet east window at the end of the Lady Chapel was filled
formerly with stained glass, representing "The Resurrection," after a
design by Sir Joshua Reynolds; it is now replaced by modern glass in
memory of the late Dean Lear. An altarpiece, composed of fragments of
the destroyed Hungerford and Beauchamp Chapels, was set up here by
Wyatt. It has lately been replaced by a triptych designed by Sir
Arthur Blomfield, with very beautiful panels painted by Mr.
Buckeridge. The seven-branched candlesticks in black-wood, silver
mounted, are by the same architect. The altar frontal, designed by Mr.
Sidney Gambier Parry, and worked by Mrs. Weigall, is so good that it
must not be overlooked. The altar itself is of stone from an old
altarpiece. Under the windows runs a series of niches, once in the
Beauchamp Chapel. Above these rich and delicate canopies, with foliage
and fan-tracery springing from corbelled heads, runs an exquisitely
sculptured frieze.

In this place, after he was canonized in 1456, the shrine of St.
Osmund was erected. His supposed tomb, moved by Wyatt to the nave, is
now replaced between the Lady Chapel and the southern aisle. Of the
shrine no trace remains; but legends of the miracles worked at it, and
the special indulgences granted to the pilgrims who visited it, prove
that it existed on this spot. The date MXCIX. inscribed upon this slab
has been questioned, on the authority of a diary made by Captain
Symons (in 1644), now in the British Museum, in which an entry occurs
with reference to this inscription, "a blew stone rising four ynches
from the ground, the east end narrower than the west, this lately
written Anno MXCIX.," but whether he means to infer that it was lately
restored, or that the date itself was a later addition, is not quite
c