nificently with the
little shafts of the piers beyond, seem more like a part of some great
mountain cavern than a mere device of architectural utility.

[Illustration: The Inverted Arches, From The North Transept.]

At the same time as the arches were built, flying buttresses were
inserted further to secure the tower, and they can be seen blocking up
the triforium and clerestory of those bays, in nave, choir, and
transepts, which adjoin it. Other repairs were necessary, for the
pier-arches of the same bays in nave and transepts were completely
shattered, and had to be replaced by the present ones, the
queer-looking capitals of which contrast so oddly with the earlier
work. It is instructive, also, to compare the lightness of these
fourteenth-century mouldings with the boldness of those, wrought at
exactly the same time, of the great inverted arches.

THE TOWER.--Besides its inverted arches and other signs of repair, the
tower is mainly noticeable for its Perpendicular fan-tracery vault of
fifteenth-century date. This vault hides the lantern with its arcades,
and thus destroys one of the elements of distance and mystery which,
before the advent of the more prosaic Perpendicular period, had been a
characteristic of Gothic architecture. Nothing else but the desire for
uniformity can account for this unjustifiable addition; for there can
have been no intention of hanging bells in the lantern when there were
already two western bell-towers. The lantern, with its cracked
masonry, can be seen during the ascent of the tower (p. 47).

The shafts of the eastern tower arches were corbelled off at some
height from the ground, in order to allow the stalls of the first
ritual choir to be set flat against the wall. This shows that Bishop
Reginald, when he rebuilt the church, kept to the old Romanesque
arrangement and made his choir under the tower, reserving his three
bays of what is now the choir for the presbytery--a very dignified
arrangement. The square holes for fixing the wooden screen of this
earlier choir can still be traced on the aisle walls in a line with
the ninth piers of the nave.

THE SCREEN was built in the fourteenth century; but Salvin altered and
spoilt it by bringing forward the middle portion to carry the
unsightly organ. Mr Freeman objected very strongly to the choir being
shut off from the nave by this screen, and urged the authorities to
pull it down and throw the whole church open from end to end. The
re