On this splendid site of many acres, where now the silent green expanse of sunlit lawn has taken the place of the busy lanes and crowded tenements, which in Henry's time hummed with the life of a mediæval river-side city, there rises the wondrous building, the crown of fifteenth century architecture, beautiful, unique--a cathedral church in size, a college chapel in plan--seeming in its lofty majesty so solitary and so aloof, and yet so instantaneously impressive. Who was the architect of this masterpiece? The credit has commonly been given to one of two men--Nicholas Close or John Langton. Close was a man of Flemish family, and one of the original six Fellows of the College. He had for a few years been the vicar of the demolished Church of S. John Zachary. He afterwards became Bishop of Carlisle. Langton was Master of Pembroke and Chancellor of the University, and was one of the commissioners appointed by the King to superintend the scheme of the works at their commencement. But both of these men were theologians and divines. We have no evidence that they were architects. Mr. G. Gilbert Scott, in his essay on "English Church Architecture," has, however, given reasons, which seem to be almost conclusive, that the man who should really have the credit of conceiving this great work was the master-mason Reginald of Ely, who as early as 1443 was appointed by a patent of Henry VI. "to press masons, carpenters, and other workmen" for the new building. According to Mr. Scott's view, Nicholas Close and his fellow surveyors merely did the work which in modern days would be done by a building committee. It was the master-mason who planned the building, and who continued to act as architect until the works came to a standstill with the deposition of the King and the enthronement of his successor Edward IV. in 1462. Moreover, the character of the general design of King's Chapel and even its architectural details, such as the setting out of its great windows, the plan of its vaulting shafts, and the groining of the roofs of the small chapels between its buttresses, lend force to Mr. Scott's contention. It is evident from the accuracy and minuteness of the directions given in "the Will of King Henry VI." (a document which was not in reality a testament, but an expression of his deliberate purpose and design with regard to his proposed foundation), that complete working plans had been prepared by an architect. Whoever that architect may have been, he had evidently been commissioned to design a chapel of magnificence worthy of a royal foundation. And where more naturally could he look for his model for such a building as the King desired than to that chapel, the largest and the most splendid hitherto erected in England, that finest specimen of decorated architecture in the kingdom, Alan de Walsingham's Lady Chapel at Ely. The relationship between the two buildings is obvious to even an uninstructed eye, but Mr. Scott has shown how closely the