method is hardly settled, and its limitations but imperfectly understood, produce the great work. It is so in literature, in music, in painting, in sculpture, and in architecture; but it is only to the last that we dare to offer the assistance of our own less artistic age. The cathedral as we see it to-day has met with many vicissitudes. Of its misfortunes in the Civil Wars much has already been said; and something of its sufferings at the hands of restorers. At present, after studying the west front and contemplating the extreme newness of its every detail, we can only hope that when age has somewhat staled the infinite variety of its modern ornament, future pilgrims to the shrine of St. Chad will not think too unkindly of an age given over to the rigours of restoration. =The Close.=--The cathedral stands in a close which was once surrounded by strong walls with bastions and a moat. Nature had supplied the moat on the south side, and the Cathedral Pool, as it is now called, is still there. The artificial moat has been drained, but its course can be easily traced running round the bishop's palace, and its water has been replaced by lovely gardens and gravel walks. Some bits of the old walls remain, the north-east bastion in the palace gardens and a turret on a house at the south corner: the "beautiful gates" of Bishop Langton are gone; but in the Vicars' Close at the west of the cathedral are two small irregular courtyards with houses so old that we feel sure that their wooden beams and plaster were there when the Royalists of the neighbourhood housed themselves within the fortified close. The close is not large, and of course, as Lichfield is a cathedral of the old establishment, there are no monastical buildings, no ruined cloisters. On the north side the ground rises rapidly in a grassy slope to a terrace, behind which are some of the canons' houses. Opposite the north transept is the deanery, a substantial red brick house in the style of the middle of the last century; next to it, and farther east, is the bishop's palace.