The Hospital and Library buildings suffer shockingly as to their exterior by the sooty atmosphere, but the various interiors are wonderfully interesting, intrinsically, and additionally from their situation amid such circumstances as those of a gigantic commercial city wherein cloistered buildings, reasonably to be expected at Oxford or Cambridge, are not looked for. The group of buildings has survived three uses: as manor-house of the baronial period; as the home of a religious fraternity; and for two hundred and fifty years as a school. The old hospitium, or guest-house, is the boys’ dormitory, where a hundred neat little cots are to be seen in long perspectives: the ancient kitchen that furnished curious, and often nasty, dinners to the ancient lords of the place and supplied the priests of the College with their not too cloistral meals—save for very shame their abstinent Friday fare of fish—is still in use, and sends forth the most appetising scents about midday; and the refectory is now partly the Governor’s quarters; while the Baronial Hall, where De la Warres held their very considerable state, is now the dining-hall. It is a noble apartment, this ancient hall, with its walls of thick masonry, its Gothic windows, and timbered roof. A bust of Chetham is placed on the wall over what was once a fireplace replacing the more ancient central hearth or brazier in the middle of the Hall. Electric lighting replaces older methods of illumination, and everywhere reveals with fine effect ancient panelling, painted devices and pictures. Over the cloister walks, in what was in the period of the collegiate establishment the priests’ dormitory, Chetham’s Library is housed in ancient presses greatly resembling those in the Bodleian at Oxford and the University Library at Cambridge. What was once the Warden’s room of the priestly establishment is now the Reading Room. To read scholarly books, to engage in the pursuit of curious knowledge in the Reading Room of Chetham’s Library is surely a wonderful privilege, for in this exquisite room, richly panelled in oak, with striped black-and-white plaster and timbered roof, and with gorgeously coloured and gilt wall paintings, the notorious Dr. Dee, Warden of the College in Elizabethan times, entertained among others Sir Walter Raleigh; and no doubt gazed into his mystic crystal globe here, on his guest’s behalf, to see what the future held in store for that courtier, warrior, explorer, and adventurer. Did it reveal nothing of that grim cell in the Tower where that unfortunate man was to spend years of captivity? Did no inimical shadows wax and wane in that crystal, to warn him that Tower Hill and the headman’s axe would cut his thread?
CHETHAM’S LIBRARY
If historic associations sufficed to bring eloquent writing into being, then what is now the Reading Room should be the parent of much literature; but the student resorting hither will have the place very much to himself, save for occasional parties of gaping visitors shown round by a Chetham’s schoolboy, for Chetham’s Library is rich rather in black-letter tomes, and in works that research feeds fat upon, than in current literature. One would not wish this cloistral seclusion amended. To find in Manchester, whose every byway seethes with life, a corner not already occupied, a spot where you can hear the ticking of a clock, is too delightful to be forgone. There is, indeed, only one other spot in Manchester where something the same conditions prevail, and that is the great palatial building of Ryland’s Library, where inestimably rare books, manuscripts, and bindings are to be found.
Manchester Cathedral adjoins Chetham’s Hospital. Cathedral though it be now, by virtue of the creation of the modern Bishopric of Manchester, the building is but a glorified parish church, and not any of the many additions made to it of recent years suffice to render it anything else. It remains, as it were, an incidental and not essential feature of the great city.
I suppose—the intense rivalry between Manchester and Liverpool being a thing to reckon with in so many directions—Manchester will not long remain content with this condition of affairs, especially since it has become known that the new Liverpool Cathedral, rising now from its foundations, is to outrange all others for size. The stranger to Manchester would certainly never imagine that the church he perceives, immediately outside the Exchange station, was of Cathedral rank; and indeed it is so only by reason of modern ecclesiastical arrangements, made expedient by the growth of great modern industrial communities.
MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL, FROM DEANSGATE.
MISERERE SEAT, MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL: THE PEDLAR AND THE MONKEYS.
MISERERES