s undoubtedly
true that it is most beautiful. Wells and Oxford on a large scale,
Burford and Chipping Campden on a small scale, are in my experience the
four most beautiful places in England, as far as buildings go. There
are other places which are full of beautiful buildings; but there is a
harmony about these four places which is a very rare and delightful
quality.

Wells, as a matter of fact, is almost impossibly beautiful, and
incredibly romantic. It is an almost perfectly mediaeval place, with
the enormous advantage that it is also old, a quality which we are apt
to forget that mediaeval places, when first built, did not possess. I
do not think that Wells, when first built, was probably more than just
a beautiful place. But it has now all grown old together, undisturbed,
unvisited. It has crumbled and weathered and mellowed into one of the
most enchanting places in the world.

God forbid that I should attempt to describe it; and indeed I am not
sure that the things that are most admired about it are the most
admirable. The west front of the Cathedral, for instance, has been
temporarily ruined by the restoration of the little marble shafts,
which now merely look like a quantity of india-rubber tubing, let in in
pieces. The choir of the Cathedral, again, is an outrage. The low stone
stalls, like a row of arbours designed by a child, the mean organ, the
comfortable seats, have a shockingly Erastian air; there is not a touch
of charm or mystery about it; I cannot imagine going there to pray. The
Vicars' Close, which is foolishly extolled, has been made by
restoration to look like a street in a small watering-place.

But, on the other hand, the Bishop's Palace, with its moat full of
swans, its fantastic oriels and turrets, its bastions and towers,
wreathed with ivy and creepers, is a thing which fills the mind with a
sort of hopeless longing to possess the secret of its beauty; one
desires in a dumb and bewildered way to surrender oneself, with a
yearning confidence, to whatever the power may be which can design and
produce a thing of such unutterable loveliness.

By the favour of an ecclesiastical friend I was allowed to wander alone
in a totally unaccountable paradise of gardens that lies to the east of
the Cathedral. It was impossible to conceive whom it belonged to, or
what connection it had with the houses round about. It was all
intersected with pools and rivulets of clear water. Here was a space of
cultivate