Truro is admirably situated, but the city does not do justice to its site. Its buildings, substantial and enduring enough, since they are built of granite, are commonplace in design, and their tameness of outline is a weariness to the spirit, save, indeed, some modern commercial structures that savour of architecture; but to mention these by name in this place would be to incur suspicion of advertisement. We came into the city down Lemon Street, past the melancholy statue of Lander the explorer, standing atop of his Doric pillar, and were disappointed on the instant of entering it by these things, and by the colour-scheme of the place—a heavy grey, unrelieved by brick or other stone than native granite. The prevailing stoniness continued even in the roadways, paved with granite setts.
LANDER.
Truro is now a cathedral city, with a cathedral in course of construction in its midst. Already the choir and the transepts are completed and consecrated, so we may form some idea of what the building will eventually look like. Its style is Early English, singularly refined and symmetrically ordered as regards the interior, but “exteriorly”—as architectural slang hath it—it has an appearance at once cramped and overladen with ornament of too minute a character, and is “picturesque” with a studied ready-made quaintness that does a hurt to the dignity of such a building. This irregularity of external details, and the whimsical incidence of turret and spirelet, belong, properly, not to an original building, but should be the outcome of generations of alteration and addition, grafted by the varying tastes of posterity upon a well-balanced design. Perhaps it was necessary for the winning of the competition for the architect to send in a showy elevation that should take the eyes of a committee, and in this Mr. Pearson succeeded, but he has failed to satisfy a reasonable demand for dignity and repose to the outward view.
The cathedral will be 300 feet in length, with two western towers and a central spire. Its site, though central, is somewhat unfortunate, because hemmed closely with the surrounding houses of High Cross. It was the site of the old Church of Saint Mary, which became of cathedral rank on the establishment of the Truro diocese in 1877, but was demolished in favour of the new scheme, saving its south aisle, retained and incorporated with the new building.
It was while I was sketching the cathedral from a point of vantage in the High Street, surrounded, meanwhile, by an intensely interested crowd of boys, that a stranger, apologising for the interruption, came up and asked me if I would mind going with him to his house, and giving an opinion as to the genuineness of a reputed Reynolds painting he had bought for some few shillings. The picture proved to be a sorry daub; but none the less for the adverse opinion, Mr. —— proved very friendly, and, as he was driving to Redruth that evening, invited self and friend to accompany him at an appointed time.
LXII.
Punctually to appointment we set forth, and once past the incline by which the city is left, whizzed along the smooth highway in the rear of a sturdy cob. We cleared the suburbs, and presently came upon the great mining-field that stretches its seamed and blasted waste over mile upon mile of dingy hummocks and ruined engine-houses. Here and there green oases of private parks and pleasaunces alleviate the harshness of the towering piles of mining refuse that harbour no green thing. But for these the scene is an abomination of desolation. Chacewater, a commonplace, mile-long village, with a poetical name, set beside the highroad amidst the heaps of rubbish, is a place of no conceivable interest.
Our acquaintance beguiled the way with local legends and scraps of entertaining information, and the sight of Chacewater moved him to tell us this story:—