The only one of the above works that calls for special notice is the restoration of the octagon and lantern. In a statement circulated by the dean and chapter in 1853 it was declared that "of all works which remain to be undertaken, the most considerable and the most important is the restoration of the lantern, including the decoration of the vault, the substitution of windows of an appropriate character for those which now disfigure it so seriously, and the addition of the outer corona of turrets and pinnacles as originally designed by Alan de Walsingham." But nothing was done towards this during Dean Peacock's lifetime. In the summer before his death he had described more particularly the disfigurements and the mutilations which the lantern had undergone; and he further pointed out the unsafe condition of the exterior. The upper windows of the octagon were of the "meanest description of carpenter's Gothic"; they had been reduced from four to three lights each; they had been shortened more than three feet (probably by Essex in the eighteenth century); the upper timbers were in a ruinous state, and incapable of being used again. The original design provided for eight lofty turrets at the angles of the greater octagon and four pinnacles in the middle of its longer sides. At the first meeting of the chapter after Dean Peacock's death it was resolved that no memorial of him would be so appropriate as the restoration of the lantern, and Mr. Scott was instructed to prepare designs at once. A tentative sketch of his design was published in October, 1859; and the opinion of experts was invited. Mr. Scott's report, dated June 10, 1859, gave the result of his careful examination. He concluded that the wooden lantern was originally "to a certain extent an imitation of the general form of the _stone octagon_ below it. Each had large windows of four lights below, with circular panels in the spandrils; each had a distinct story over these windows, lighted by smaller windows consisting of several detached lights, and each had considerable turrets, probably surmounted by pinnacles at the angles, and, in all probability, open parapets between them."[30] He embodied the results of the evidence he had got together in the design he submitted. Further examination, in the following year, satisfied the architect that no spire had ever been erected on the lantern, and that even if Walsingham had ever intended to have one, he had yet finished his work without any preparation for such an addition. A design for such a spire was, however, prepared and submitted to the dean and chapter, but it was never adopted.