and Albert Museum would have been more suitable.  A very considerable proportion of the museum’s space is devoted to the collection of pictures—­some of them copies—­which the University has gathered.  The interesting Turner water-colours presented by John Ruskin are here, with a Murillo, reputed to be his earliest known work, and a good many other examples of the work of famous men of the Italian and Dutch Schools.

Besides the Museum of Archaeology, between Peterhouse and the river, the vigorous growth of the scientific side of the University is shown in the vast buildings newly erected on both sides of Downing Street, which has now become a street of laboratories and museums.  Now that the outworks of the hoary citadel of Classicism have been stormed, and the undermining of the great walls has already begun, the development of modern science at Cambridge will be accelerated, and in the face of the urgency of the demands of worldwide competition it would appear that the University on the Cam is more fitted to survive than her sister on the Isis.

[Illustration:  The circular Norman church of the Holy sepulchre.  This splendid survival of the Norman age is one of the four churches in England planned to imitate the form of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.]

CHAPTER VI

THE CHURCHES IN THE TOWN

Almost everyone who goes to Cambridge as a visitor bent on sightseeing naturally wishes to see the colleges before anything else, but it should not be forgotten that there are at least two churches, apart from the college chapels, whose importance is so great that to fail to see them would be a criminal omission.  There are other churches of considerable interest, but for a description of them it is unfortunately impossible to find space.

Foremost in point of antiquity comes St. Benedict’s, or St Benet’s, possessing a tower belonging to pre-Conquest times, and the only structural relic of the Saxon town now in existence.  The church was for a considerable time the chapel of Corpus Christi, and the ancient tower still rises picturesquely over the roofs of the old court of that college.

Without the tower, the church would be of small interest, for the nave and chancel are comparatively late, and have been rather drastically restored.  The interior, nevertheless, is quite remarkable in possessing a massive Romanesque arch opening into the tower, with roughly carved capitals to its tall responds.  Outside there are all the unmistakable features of Saxon work—­the ponderously thick walls, becoming thinner in the upper parts, the “long and short” method of arranging the coigning, and the double windows divided with a heavy baluster as at Wharram-le-Street in Yorkshire, Earl’s Barton in Northamptonshire, and elsewhere.