ceits creep in even to places like this, and a grotesque tale of monkeys churning butter, stealing it away, being apprehended and brought to condign punishment on the scaffold, may all be read here carved in the imperishable oak. But the service was too exquisitely intoned and too deeply devotional to be marred by contact with this mediæval by-play.

The chapter-house is even more beautiful than York's, in that it has a central pier surrounded by ten clustered marble shafts that separate above like palm-branches, and radiate to the angles of the decagon, between which angles in each space are double-lancet windows on all sides, save at the entrance. It is also to my mind more beautiful exteriorly than York's, being supported, if not upheld, by bold flying buttresses, which enter so freely into this cathedral's construction. Worcester's polygon is said to be the only one of its class more ancient than this. Parliaments sat in this chapter-house under Edward I. and after; and nowhere has the Church of England's independence of Rome been maintained more uncompromisingly than at Lincoln. Cloisters adjoin it on the west, never monastic, for then

their location would have been on the other side of the cathedral. They are on the line of the old Roman station, and parts of its tesselated pavement are still preserved. Wren rebuilt the buildings on the north of the cloister garth in the Renaissance style; and there we stood in the gathering twilight and looked up to the mighty central tower, while Great Tom struck the hour with his ponderous tongue, in deep tones which seemed to invest him, like his brethren in many other minster belfries, with almost a human personality.

Let us come round by the southern face to say farewell, and stand midway by the unique cruciform Galilee porch, once perhaps connected with the episcopal palace which, only lately restored, stands directly across the street. It is as if two enormous churches met at this point and stretched away indefinitely in either direction. "In bold defiance of convention," the splendid expanse to the left insistently leads the eye aloft; but rich and varied as it is, the ornamentation grows richer eastward. Passing the broad southern transept, the high lights strike the tall and narrow second range of minor, or eastern, transepts, and fall upon the niched and buttressed angel-choir, while