The metropolitan cathedral of Canterbury owes its enthralling interest to its vastness of scale, its wealth of monuments, its treasures of early glass, the great historical scenes that have been enacted within its walls—above all, to that greatest of all historical tragedies to the mind of the mediæval Englishman, the murder of Becket. It does not owe its distinction to its architecture. Whole building periods are almost wholly unrepresented; for the century and a half when English design was at its best, the Canterbury authorities slumbered and slept. What we have is the result of two periods only, with some scraps incorporated from earlier Norman work. What is there is not of the best: the Perpendicular work can be bettered at Gloucester, Winchester, and York; the work in the choir, a foreign importation, is not equal to that of its prototype, the French cathedral of Sens. We have many heterogeneous cathedrals in England. In the rest there is ever an attempt, usually a successful attempt, as at Hereford, and Gloucester, and Wells, to weld the conflicting elements of the design into symmetry and harmony. Canterbury scornfully declines any attempt at composition. Transepts and turrets and pinnacles are plumped down anyhow and anywhere; to the east it finishes abruptly in the ruined crags of a vast round tower; to the west the towers of its façade were, till lately, as incongruous in character as in date. Externally, the lofty central tower alone gives some unity to the scattered masses; internally it is an assemblage of distinct and discordant buildings. I. NORMAN.—Of the pre-Conquest cathedrals of Canterbury nothing remains, unless it be fragments of rude masonry in crypt and cloister. Of Lanfranc’s cathedral, built, together with the Benedictine monastery, between 1070 and 1077, there remains the plinth of the walls of nave and transept. In the north transept some of his small square blocks of Caen stone are well seen just above the site of the martyrdom, as well as his turret in the north-west corner. His nave was allowed to stand till the fifteenth century. The present nave and central transept are built on Lanfranc’s foundations. The Norman work has had a most deleterious effect on the later design. To preserve the Norman north-west tower of the façade, the fifteenth century nave was built too short; to preserve the lines of his transept, it was rebuilt with a projection of only one bay to north and south, and without aisles, and appears woefully shrunken when compared with the vast transept of York, or even with the twelfth century transepts of Winchester and Ely. Lanfranc’s cathedral was an unambitious building, built in a hurry; closely copied, to save time probably, both in plan and dimensions, from William the Conqueror’s abbey-church at Caen, from which Lanfranc came to rule at Canterbury. [Illustration: SOUTH CHOIR AISLE.]