the Cathedral of the Holy and Undivided Trinity for seven centuries and a half.

Where is the massive Norman nave of eight bays, once grand in its stern simplicity? Burned, all but two of them, in the thirteenth century. Where is the magnificent Early English choir of that century, rebuilt by Henry III., with so little regard to the ruined nave that it has a different axis? Destroyed, as the fourteenth century dawned, by the same fell scourge which laid in ashes so much of medieval treasure. Here is the only opportunity to see an English cathedral still partly in ruins; for the six bays yawn pitifully upward to the sky, having no confirmation of their location save the bases of their pillars set in the turf-grown pavement. The two bays which are enclosed by a west front make a short nave indeed, more like a transept; and their arches are all twisted and shapeless from the nature of the shingly soil into which their weight has crushed down the heavy piers below, till some of the bases of the massive round columns are buried beneath the level of the stone floor. The second rebuilding could not have been more than half done when proud Edward I., in the

last year of his reign, met his Parliament at Carlisle, and court and Parliament together listened in the cathedral while the papal legate excommunicated and cursed dauntless Robert the Bruce. Edward had come north in a litter, but offered it up here as health improved, and, mounting his horse at the church door, rode fiercely away toward the Scottish border, which he never reached, for he died within sight of it. It was not till the third Edward that the choir stood in the

Decorated style which we now see, with the, painted wooden ceiling, of which the present is a reproduction. The backs of the stalls too are covered with wonderfully quaint paintings of the legendary stories of Saints Augustine, Anthony, and Cuthbert; and the choir pillars have for their capitals carved delineations of the occupations of each month of the year, an instance quite unparalleled.

Whether the great Flamboyant east window, beneath which lies the author of Paley's Evidences, is the largest and finest in England is not easily determined, when Gloucester and York press so closely for the honor; and it matters little where all are so splendidly beautiful. Its subject is a Doom or

Last Judgment.

There can be no better place than here for calling attention to the development of the Gothic traceried window from the simple Norman grouping of two or three plain upright lights together, with pierced openings in the wall over them. These long narrow lights had first been single and round-headed, then grouped closely together and pointed; then an arched moulding was thrown over them on the wall, and small openings were made in the enclosed space between moulding and window-tops. Afterwards these small openings enlarge and multiply into a connected pattern, the separations of the upright windows become mere strips instead of jambs, and the arch, with all that lies below, has been blended into a harmonious whole, in what is rather infelicitously called the "plate-traceried" window. Develop the process still farther, change all the flat surfaces above into mere mouldings, and shrink the columnar stone divisions into mullions, and, using geometrical patterns only, the noblest form of Decorated tracery is before us. Carry the changes still on to their latest form, as here at Carlisle, and geometrical forms become flowing and unconfined, like