clearly an instance of that state of the style when people had been forced by the difficulties and inelegancies of the round arch in groining to adopt pointed arches for groining but had not learnt to use them for windows.......This morning after breakfast went to the Cathedral (looking by the way at a curious old cross in the street).  I thought that its inside was wholly Norman, and was most agreeably surprised by finding the whole inside groined in every part with excellent late decorated or perpendicular work.  Yet there are several signs about it which lead me to think that the whole inside has been Norman, and even that the pilasters now worked up into the perpendicular are Norman.  The transepts are most massive old Norman, with side-aisles running round their ends (which I never saw before).  The groining of the side aisles of the nave very effective from the strength of the cross ribs.  The clerestory windows of the quire very large.  The organ is on one side.  But the best thing about the quire is the wooden stall-work, of early decorated, very beautiful.  A superb Lady Chapel, of early English.

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PORTSMOUTH,
1840, June 23.

We left Winchester by evening train to the Dolphin, Southampton, and slept there.  At nine in the morning we went by steamboat down the river to Ryde in the Isle of Wight:  our steamer was going on to Portsmouth, but we thought it better to land at Ryde and take a boat for ourselves.  We then sailed out (rather a blowing day) to the vessel attending Col.  Pasley’s operations, and after a good deal of going from one boat to another (the sea being so rough that our boat could not be got up to the ships) and a good deal of waiting, we got on board the barge or lump in which Col.  Pasley was.  Here we had the satisfaction of seeing the barrel of gunpowder lowered (there was more than a ton of gunpowder), and seeing the divers go down to fix it, dressed in their diving helmets and supplied with air from the great air-pump above.  When all was ready and the divers had ascended again, the barge in which we were was warped away, and by a galvanic battery in another barge (which we had seen carried there, and whose connection with the barrel we had seen), upon signal given by sound of trumpet, the gunpowder was fired.  The effect was most wonderful.  The firing followed the signal instantaneously.  We were at between 100 and 200 yards from the place (as I judge), and the effects were as follows.  As soon as the signal was given, there was a report, louder than a musket but not so loud as a small cannon, and a severe shock was felt at our feet, just as if our barge had struck on a rock.  Almost immediately, a very slight swell was perceived over the place of the explosion, and the water looked rather foamy:  then in about a second it began to rise, and there was the most enormous outbreak of spray that you can conceive.  It rose in one column of 60 or 70 feet