being again used as a cemetery, which is
unfortunate, since there are few things more irreligiously dismal than
a modern burial-ground, and already a cluster of marble and granite
monuments has arisen to spoil one of the most peaceful and unspoilt
places in Wells. If monuments there must be (and why need we so
advertise the dead?), let them at least be quiet and humble and
beautiful: those ostentatious erections of hard and polished stone
ruin the grey walls before which they stand; their frigid materials
are too obtrusive for Christian modesty, too enduring for human
memory. May we not yet hope that this spot will be spared the fate of
the cloister garth?

From here the Lady Chapel is well seen as quite a separate building,
joined to the rest of the church only in its lower part, and with its
own parapet round all its eight sides; its form harmonises most
charmingly with the square presbytery behind it, and with the lofty
chapter-house, like itself octagonal. A further beauty is added by the
solitary flying buttress which stands out at the south-eastern corner;
though certain rents in the southern wall show that the buttress was
built for reasons of the gravest utility. On the south side of the
chapel there is a little door, covered by what looks at first like a
kind of porch, but it is really the passage of a small vestry (p. 132)
which was built up against the wall; the roof of the vestry was a
little higher than that of the passage, and must have leant against
the wall just under the window, as is proved by its gargoyle near the
passage door. This vestry was fatuously destroyed in the early part of
this century by an official who did not even know that it was medieval
work till the soundness of the masonry proved almost too much for his
workmen.

The junction between the earlier and the later presbytery is well seen
from here--too well seen, in fact, for it is awkwardly managed. The
later choir windows, with their crocketed ogee hood-moulds, are a good
feature, and so are the flying buttresses; but the high-pitched roof
of the earlier aisle is discontinued at the break in order to give
room for these windows and buttresses; and the effect of this sudden
termination of an aisle roof half-way along a building is not
pleasant. In the earlier part, too, the later windows have been
clumsily inserted some distance below the Early English dripstone, as
if only the internal effect had been considered. The same may also b