Highways and Byways in Cambridge and ElyConybeare, John William Edward
History
Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely
Conybeare, John William Edward
Cambridgeshire (England) -- Description and travel; Isle of Ely (England) -- Description and travel
"Thy mighty Scholiast, whose unwearied pains
Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains;
Turn what they will to verse, their toil is vain;
Critics like me shall make it prose again."]
[Footnote 53: To every College is attached some high-placed personage
as Visitor, with a vague, but by no means unreal, power of
interference when appealed to. Bentley was only saved from deposition
by the sudden death of the Visitor.]
[Footnote 54: The Senate is the general assembly of Masters of Arts,
which is the supreme University authority.]
[Footnote 55: _Guide to Cambridge_, p. 129. The meaning of the curious
word "Harry-Soph" is apparently equivalent to a student unequal to a
Degree. Bentley was deprived of all his Degrees.]
The profuse gilding and painting which enriches walls and roof in the
Chapel is due to a restoration some forty years ago, when the outside
was also faced with stone, and the windows filled with stained glass,
commemorating ecclesiastical and other celebrities throughout all the
Christian centuries. The Apostles appear in the most easterly windows
on either side; whence the series progresses in chronological order
westwards. The figures are for the most part powerfully drawn, and
should be examined through an opera glass to appreciate their wealth
of detail. We can thus see that Hildebrand has driven his crosier
through the eagles of the Imperial Crown, that Dante, Matthew Paris,
and Roger Bacon, hold in their hands copies of their own greatest
works, that Giotto is studying an elevation of his Campanile; while
noted church-builders, like St. Hugh of Lincoln and William of
Wykeham, carry models of their edifices. The hapless Mary Tudor holds
one of this very Chapel, of which she was the Foundress. It is
appropriate that the beautiful silver cross over the Altar should be
Spanish work of her date, though only placed there a few years ago by
the generosity of some members of the College who met with it while
travelling in Spain. It was originally a processional cross, and has
been adapted for its new purpose with artistic skill of the first
order.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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