Lincoln Cathedral, founded in the eleventh century, and finished in 1092, shared the fate of so many other timber-roofed buildings of the period. The greater part of it was destroyed by fire in 1124. It was rebuilt and enlarged by St. Hugh in accordance with the new ideas he had brought with him from France, a very natural consequence of his supervision, when we take into account that as mandatory of Pope Gregory VII. he had been Bishop of Grenoble. The church was again partly destroyed by an earthquake in 1185. It was then rebuilt, enlarged, and completed by Bishop Grossetête, an Englishman by birth, who had, however, been educated and brought up in France in the early part of the thirteenth century, and had carried over with him to his native land the essence of the grand and noble inspirations which marked that marvellous era. [Illustration: 60. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. PLAN] [Illustration: 61. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. WEST FRONT] The lantern-tower at the intersection of the western transept, which had fallen in 1235, was either rebuilt or finished by Bishop Grossetête about 1240. In its general outline and in detail it recalls the great lantern-tower of Coutances in Normandy, which seems also to have served as model for that of St. Ouen at Rouen in the fourteenth century. The vast and magnificent Cathedral of Lincoln is an admirable subject for comparative study. Its architecture combines most strikingly the characteristics of the two nations. It blends in one harmonious whole the massive solidity of English structure overlaid with detail, formed by lines vertical, rigid, dry, and hard as iron, and the mingled grace and strength of French architecture, which may fitly be compared with gold, in its union of the supple and the durable, of solidity and power of resistance equal to those of the less precious metal, with an adaptability to artistic ends far greater. [Illustration: 62. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. TRANSEPT] [Illustration: 63. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL. APSE AND CHAPTER-HOUSE] In the façade and the west towers English characteristics predominate, but the choir and the apse are French in composition, and most probably in execution, as is also the presbytery, in which both the arrangement and the details of the bays recall those of the lateral façades of Bourges.[14] All three are veritable masterpieces, worthy of the most brilliant period of French mediæval architecture.