Truro cathedral, consecrated in 1887, is the first entirely new cathedral designed in England since St. Paul’s. The nave, towers, spires, chapter-house, and cloister are still to build. In dimensions it ranks with Norwich and Wells; in plan it is as complex as any of the greater of our cathedrals. It is intended to have three towers and spires, a south porch, western porches, an aisled nave of nine bays, a central transept with eastern and western aisles and baptistery, a choir, sanctuary, and eastern processional aisle, a square east end, and an unaisled eastern transept, projecting slightly beyond the aisles. Below the choir is a crypt, appropriated to vestries. The crypt is supposed to be in the massive style of the latter years of the twelfth century. The choir is supposed to have been commenced in the early years of the thirteenth century; but since, as in the transepts of Salisbury, the aisle windows are lancets, while those of the clerestory have early plate-tracery, the upper part of the choir is supposed not to have been finished before the middle of the century. So again, in the half-century or so which is supposed to elapse between the commencement and the completion of the cathedral, the design is supposed to have been altered here and there as it passed through different hands; hence the rose-windows, which are unusually plentiful, are all different; the transept ends are differently treated; the arches of the choir are narrow, those of the nave are wide; the latter has coupled bays, the choir has not; the quadripartite vault of the choir becomes more complex in the nave, just as it does at Lincoln. And just as the Lincoln architect dropped down fortuitous chapels at the west end of the nave, so Mr. Pearson purposely forgot to leave room for a baptistery, and tacked it on, in a carefully casual manner, to the south transept. The cloister, too, is to be three-sided and lop-sided, as at Chichester. Internally, the cathedral is picturesquely beautiful, and admirably adapted for the ritual of the Church of England as it was in the thirteenth century. The south side of the choir has the remarkable peculiarity of having three aisles; so has that of Oxford cathedral. But it got its three aisles in a different way from Oxford. Mr. Pearson was instructed to leave standing a piece of genuine mediæval work, late and good—viz., the south aisle of the old church of St. Mary’s. The cathedral was placed to the north of it, just so far off as to barely admit the buttresses supporting the flying-buttresses of the choir vault. These buttresses Mr. Pearson pierced with arches, and, roofing over the space from buttress to buttress, got a narrow intermediate aisle between the choir-aisle to the north and St. Mary’s aisle to the south. Thus on the south side of the choir there are three ranges of piers and three ranges of arches, and the changing vistas and perspectives and mysterious distances are delightful.