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shire, who also has a window to her memory in the lady-chapel. Her name and Izaak Walton's are worthy ones wherewith to sustain the non-political fame of Winchester. Izaak left a fragrant and imperishable memory, not only in this spot, but wherever literature is read or nature loved. He fished the river Itchen, which waters this valley, to some purpose, and still has a well-recognized local successor. In the fulness of great age he was peacefully buried in Prior Silkstede's Chapel off the south transept, where a flat slab in the pavement, from which a rug was carefully removed to show it to us, quaintly recounts his many virtues. He should have been buried out of doors, like Saint Swithin.

The tomb of William of Wykeham is the fine chantry which the good bishop himself erected, between two bays of the nave where he was wont to pray; but though his alabaster effigy has been happily spared, yet, as with Wren at St. Paul's, his monument lies rather all around him. The low, oaken choir-screen is modern and admits to a choir and higher presbytery beyond of great dignity and intense interest. The heavily-carved oaken stalls, black with age, with their odd miserere-stools,

VOL. II. 18

are Early Decorated and of great beauty, — the oldest in England except at Exeter. The eye is at once attracted by six great gabled wooden coffers, richly colored, three on each side. They are ranged on the summit of Bishop Fox's lofty stone screen in Perpendicular work, with its cinque-cento, or Renaissance, frieze, that encloses the presbytery at the sides and extends east to the reredos. These are mortuary, or reliquary, chests, containing the bones of Saxon kings and bishops. Time and fate have dealt hardly with their contents. The names of Egbert, Alfred, Canute and his wife Emma and son Hardicanute, and of William Rufus have been found upon them, and doubtless authentically; but how the fragments that remain within are to be assorted and assigned, and what are missing, are questions that must be left unanswered until the Judgment Day. There were plenty of political fluctuations here before the spoliations of Edward VI.'s day and of the great Rebellion. But after a Cromwellian populace had stormed the cathedral, and amused itself after its fashion by breaking open these caskets, and pelting the stained glass windows with the bones, identification became a lost art!

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Magnificently lofty and rich, reaching to the clerestory itself, is the Perpendicular stone reredos, filled with tabernacle work, completely restored, and having for an altar-piece beneath the great white cross (if it be not now removed, as contemplated) Benjamin West's painting of "The Raising of Lazarus." The mediocre American painter's work is hardly equal to its mighty surroundings. The "Holy Hole," as it is called, is scarcely a dignified term for the former depository of relics in a space behind the altar, at the ends of which rise two more of the oratory tombs for which Winchester is justly famous. One is Bishop Fox's, the godfather of Henry VIII., and author of the "Book of Martyrs," whose illustrations have exercised so potent a fascination over many a child. The other is Gardiner's, who solemnized the illomened marriage of Bloody Mary to swarthy Philip of Spain in the lady-chapel beyond. Ere the work was completed here, the Renaissance had dawned, and its architectural details began to debase the Gothic with which they mingle. Next these chantries lie ghastly carven figures of mortality, skeleton emblems of corruption so morbidly common at the close of the Middle Ages. The main structure east

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