The deeply recessed clerestory of round-headed windows is curiously amalgamated with the triforium of couplets having pointed arches; in the spandril between each of which latter are elaborately decorated circles, some with a kind of rude dog-tooth star and others with a kind of eternal interlacing which looks something like an interwoven horseshoe pattern. In other instances, as at Southwell Minster, the triforium absorbs the clerestory, but at St. David’s it retains its character and becomes a screen to the passage over the arcade. The result is a very rich confusion. The amalgamation of distinct members not only precludes either the usual appearance of a church with or without a triforium, but the treatment of the triforial arches themselves is clever without being pleasing (see illustrations, pp. 22, 24, 25). The arches which enclose both the triforium and clerestory are again very rich, and the ornamentation is carried down their whole length without shafts or cappings. Clustered shafts with the Norman cushion capitals having square abaci receive the shafts of the wooden ceiling. Of the previous nave-roof we have no date, but very possibly it may have resembled that at Peterborough or St. Alban’s, as something similar seems to have existed at Llandaff. The present roof is generally accredited to the Treasurer, Owen Pole (1472-1509), and in all likelihood that of the choir may be also. “This very singular, if not unique, structure is, in its construction, simply a flat ceiling of timber laid upon the walls; but, by some, certainly unjustifiable, violations of the laws of architectural reality, such as are not uncommon even in the stone roofs of that period, it is made to assume a character wholly its own, and which it is very difficult to describe in an intelligible manner. By the employment of vast pendants, which at the sides take the form of overlapping capitals to the small shafts already mentioned, the ceiling appears to be supported by a system of segmental arches effecting a threefold longitudinal division of the roof, and crossed by a similar range springing from the walls. Of course these arches in reality support nothing, but are in fact borne up by what appears to rest on them. Notwithstanding this unreality and the marked inconsistency of the roof with the architecture below, notwithstanding that its general character would have been much more adapted to some magnificent state apartment in a royal palace, still the richness and singularity of such an interminable series of fretted lines renders this on the whole one of the most attractive features of the cathedral. Both the arches themselves, and the straight lines which divide the principal panels, drip with minute foliations like lace-work in a style of almost Arabian gorgeousness. It is much to be regretted