are so beautiful that they take away our breath—­that broken statue of the Madonna and Child, for instance, perhaps the loveliest piece of fourteenth century sculpture to be found in England.  No, however we consider the great church of Winchester, it stands alone.  As a mere building it is more tremendous and more venerable than anything now left to us upon English soil; as a burial place it possesses the dust not only of the Apostle of the heart of England but of the greatest of the Saxon kings, while beneath its mighty vault William Rufus sleeps, the only Norman king that lies in England.  And as a shrine of art it still possesses incomparable things.  It stands there as the Pyramids stand in the desert, a relic of a lost civilisation; but by it we may measure the modern world.

It is, too, when you consider it, utterly lonely.  The revolution we call the Reformation upon which the modern world turns and turns as upon a pivot, while it spared Winchester Cathedral, though reluctantly, swept away all the buildings which surrounded it.  The great monastery is gone, scarcely a sign of it remains.  Nothing at all is left of the famous nunnery of St Mary.  Of Wolvesey Castle there are a few beautiful ruins, of Hyde Abbey, all has been swept away, even the stones, even the bones of Alfred.  Nor have the other and later religious houses, with which Winchester was full, fared better.  It is difficult to find even the sites of the houses of the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Austin Friars, the Carmelites.  And what remains of the College of St Elizabeth, and, but for a Norman doorway, now in Catholic hands, of the Hospital of St Mary Magdalen?  Only the Hospital of St John remains at the east end of the High Street, still in possession of its fine Hall and Chapel, and the great school founded by William of Wykeham in 1382, “for seventy poor and needy scholars and clerks living college-wise in the same, studying and becoming proficient in grammaticals or the art and science of grammar.”  It remains without compare, the oldest and the greatest school in England, whose daughter is Eton and whose late descendant is Harrow.

To say that the Cathedral, the College and the Hospital of St John are all that remains of mediaeval Winchester would not, perhaps, be strictly true; but it is so near the truth that one might say it without fear of contradiction.  Most of the old churches even have perished.  There remain St John Baptist, which can boast of Transitional arcades, and fifteenth century screen and pulpit; St Maurice with a Norman doorway; St Peter with its twelfth and thirteenth century work; St Bartholomew with some Norman remains near the site of Hyde Abbey; and in the High Street there is more than one fine old house.  The fact that so little remains cannot altogether be placed to the discredit of the Reformation and the Puritan fanatics.  Until the eighteenth century something remained of Hyde Abbey, much of the Hospital of St Mary Magdalen; the city walls were then practically perfect, having all their five gates, north, south, east and west, and King’s gate; now of all these only the Westgate of the thirteenth century remains to us with the King’s gate over which is the little church of St Swithin.