“Such as these were the motives of Edward,” says the Dean.  Yes, certainly; but such as these also, first, were the acts and visions of Edward.  Take care that you don’t slip away, by the help of the glycerine of the word “motives,” into fancying that all these tales are only the after colours and pictorial metaphors of sentimental piety.  They are either plain truth or black lies; take your choice,—­but don’t tickle and treat yourselves with the prettiness or the grotesqueness of them, as if they were Anderssen’s fairy tales.  Either the King did carry the beggar on his back, or he didn’t; either Godiva rode through Coventry, or she didn’t; either the Earl Leofric saw the vision of the bright child at the altar—­or he lied like a knave.  Judge, as you will; but do not Doubt.

“The Abbey was fifteen years in building.  The King spent upon it one-tenth of the property of the kingdom.  It was to be a marvel of its kind.  As in its origin it bore the traces of the fantastic and childish” (I must pause, to ask you to substitute for these blameful terms, ‘fantastic and childish,’ the better ones of ’imaginative and pure’) “character of the King and of the age; in its architecture it bore the stamp of the peculiar position which Edward occupied in English history between Saxon and Norman.  By birth he was a Saxon, but in all else he was a foreigner.  Accordingly the Church at Westminster was a wide-sweeping innovation on all that had been seen before.  ‘Destroying the old building,’ he says in his charter, ’I have built up a new one from the very foundation.’  Its fame as a ’new style of composition’ lingered in the minds of men for generations.  It was the first cruciform church in England, from which all the rest of like shape were copied—­an expression of the increasing hold which, in the tenth century, the idea of the Crucifixion had laid on the imagination of Europe.  The massive roof and pillars formed a contrast with the rude wooden rafters and beams of the common Saxon churches.  Its very size—­occupying, as it did, almost the whole area of the present building—­was in itself portentous.  The deep foundations, of large square blocks of grey stone, were duly laid; the east end was rounded into an apse; a tower rose in the centre, crowned by a cupola of wood.  At the western end were erected two smaller towers, with five large bells.  The hard strong stones were richly sculptured; the windows were filled with stained glass; the roof was covered with lead.  The cloisters, chapter-house, refectory, dormitory, the infirmary, with its spacious chapel, if not completed by Edward, were all begun, and finished in the next generation on the same plan.  This structure, venerable as it would be if it had lasted to our time, has almost entirely vanished.  Possibly one vast dark arch in the southern transept, certainly the substructures of the dormitory, with their huge pillars, ‘grand and regal at the bases and capitals,’ the massive, low-browed passage leading from the great cloister to Little Dean’s Yard, and some portions of the refectory and of the infirmary chapel, remain as specimens of the work which astonished the last age of the Anglo-Saxon and the first age of the Norman monarchy.”