Fell the tears of stern and hardy men,
As his had fallen on the graves of others.
Surely one hears the trumpet on the dusty field of Meeanee, and the word of command of the stern old general. The inscription can be by none other but Sir Charles Napier. There is not much in verse that rings like these few lines of prose.
The Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, Chichester.
FROM NORTH-EAST.
Chichester cathedral, though one of the smallest, is to the student of mediæval architecture one of the most interesting and important of our Cathedrals. At Salisbury one or two styles of architectures are represented; at Canterbury two or three; at Chichester every single style is to be seen without a break from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. It is an epitome of English architectural history for 500 years. Early Norman, late Norman, late Transitional, early Lancet, late Lancet, early Geometrical, late Geometrical, Curvilinear, Perpendicular and Tudor work all appear in the structure side by side. We have many other heterogeneous and composite cathedrals, but nowhere, except perhaps at Hereford, can the whole sequence of the mediæval styles be read so well as at Chichester.
The last kingdom, says Canon Bright, that remained outside the Church, was that of the South Saxons, hemmed in by a thick line of well-nigh impenetrable forest, and so barbarous as to be at once ignorant of one of the simplest arts, and furious against the incoming of foreigners. It was reserved for the great Wilfrid, of Hexham, Ripon and York, in one of his exiles (611)—caused originally by the high-handed partition of his overlarge diocese of York—to do what no one as yet had done for these poor rude heathen—what some Irish monks had tried to do and had failed. They were desperate with famine; he taught them to fish in the sea; for he was as ready in homely crafts of this kind as in adorning churches or educating young nobles; and as Bede says, “by this kind act he turned their hearts to love him; and they began the more willingly to hope for heavenly blessings under his preaching, when by his assistance they had received earthly good.”