Truro is admirably situated, but the city does not do justice to its site. Its buildings, substantial and enduring enough, since they are built of granite, are commonplace in design, and their tameness of outline is a weariness to the spirit, save, indeed, some modern commercial structures that savour of architecture; but to mention these by name in this place would be to incur suspicion of advertisement. We came into the city down Lemon Street, past the melancholy statue of Lander the explorer, standing atop of his Doric pillar, and were disappointed on the instant of entering it by these things, and by the colour-scheme of the place--a heavy grey, unrelieved by brick or other stone than native granite. The prevailing stoniness continued even in the roadways, paved with granite setts. [Illustration: LANDER.] Truro is now a cathedral city, with a cathedral in course of construction in its midst. Already the choir and the transepts are completed and consecrated, so we may form some idea of what the building will eventually look like. Its style is Early English, singularly refined and symmetrically ordered as regards the interior, but “exteriorly”--as architectural slang hath it--it has an appearance at once cramped and overladen with ornament of too minute a character, and is “picturesque” with a studied ready-made quaintness that does a hurt to the dignity of such a building. This irregularity of external details, and the whimsical incidence of turret and spirelet, belong, properly, not to an original building, but should be the outcome of generations of alteration and addition, grafted by the varying tastes of posterity upon a well-balanced design. Perhaps it was necessary for the winning of the competition for the architect to send in a showy elevation that should take the eyes of a committee, and in this Mr. Pearson succeeded, but he has failed to satisfy a reasonable demand for dignity and repose to the outward view. The cathedral will be 300 feet in length, with two western towers and a central spire. Its site, though central, is somewhat unfortunate, because hemmed closely with the surrounding houses of High Cross. It was the site of the old Church of Saint Mary, which became of cathedral rank on the establishment of the Truro diocese in 1877, but was demolished in favour of the new scheme, saving its south aisle, retained and incorporated with the new building.