folk,
who do not live within its walls, while a very meagre wayfarer's dole
is still distributed to all who pass by so far as a horn of beer and
two loaves of bread will go. Each of the Brethren of St Cross beside a
little house and maintenance receives five shillings a week.

All this sounds, if you be poor, too good to be true. It is too good to
owe its origin to the modern world, but not extraordinary for the
Middle Age, which was eagerly and even violently Christian. And just as
the institution seems in itself wonderful to us in our day, so do the
buildings, which, if one would really understand how gloriously strange
they are, should be carefully compared with the county workhouse.

One enters the Hospital by a gate, and, passing through a small court,
comes to the great gatehouse of Cardinal Beaufort, consisting of
gateway, porter's lodge and great square tower. Here and there we still
see Cardinal Beaufort's arms and devices, while over the gate itself
are three niches, in one of which a kneeling figure of the Cardinal
remains. Within this gatehouse is a large quadrangle, about three sides
of which the hospital is set with the church upon the south, between
which and the gatehouse runs a sixteenth century cloister. The whole is
wonderfully quiet and peaceful, a corner of that old England, England
of my heart, which is so fast vanishing away.

The noblest building of this most noble place, and the only one now
left to us which dates from its foundation by Bishop Henry of Blois is
the church. This is a great Transitional building, one of the finest
examples of that style in England, and dates from about 1160 to 1292.
It is a cruciform building with central tower, the nave and chancel
being aisled, the transepts, aisles and all, vaulted in stone in the
fourteenth century. The earliest part of the church is the chancel,
which has a square eastern end, and the lower parts of the transepts
probably date from the same time. These transepts were finished a
little later, when the nave was begun and finished, and the north porch
built in the thirteenth century. The clerestory of the nave dates from
the first half of the fourteenth century, and so does the great western
window. Much of the furniture of the church is interesting, such as the
fourteenth century tiles, the curious Norman bowl that does duty as a
font, the fourteenth century glass in the clerestory window of the
nave, and that, little though it be, of the fif