It will be seen, therefore, that Salisbury owes its effect to something beyond ornament or size. The extraordinary order and regularity of the masonry may have something to say to it, although the stones, as compared with what may be seen in Egypt, and elsewhere, are not very large. But you can trace the same course all round the church and the same stone, oolite from the quarry at Chilmark, has been used throughout. This communicates a certain look of stability to the structure, which is, in itself, more pleasing to the eye than any amount of ornament out of place, or intended, as in modern Gothic, to divert the eye from the poverty of the materials or the absence of proportion. The proportions of Salisbury, like those of St. Paul’s, or the Parthenon, are calculated to give the building its full measure of beauty, without anything extraneous. That Salisbury should have this unity of age and design is owing to a curious fact in the history of the place. The “bishop’s stool” had been upon the bleak, chalk down which borders Salisbury Plain. The place was really a castle whose fortifications are still visible; the cathedral within the walls must have been Norman in design, to judge in dry seasons from the marks still visible among the grassy mounds, and from fragments of carved stone built into the wall or cross. Mr. Walcott gives its dimensions as follows: “A nave one hundred and fifty feet by seventy-two feet, a transept one hundred and fifty feet by sixty feet, and a choir sixty feet in length, in all two hundred and seventy feet.” The situation was in every way inconvenient, having been chosen for security not comfort. After the King took the fort and filled it with his own soldiers, a governor superseding the bishop, the position of the ecclesiastics became unendurable. The inhabitants in times of comparative peace and security migrated to the rich pastures by the Avon and the Bourne below, while cold winds in winter, and a scarcity of water in summer, finally determined Bishop Poore and his canons, for Sarum was a church of the old foundation, to seek a better country. The old legend says that the site of the new cathedral was determined by the fall of an arrow in Merrifield (or more likely Mirifield), shot by a stalwart archer from the ramparts. The church was raised in a green vale, surrounded by the downs. Pepys, in describing his journey from Hungerford says, “So, all over the Plain by the sight of the steeple, the Plain high and low; to Salisbury by night.” “Of the cathedral,” Pepys remarks that it is “most admirable; as big, I think, and handsomer than Westminster, and a most large close about it.” Pepys’ comparison of Westminster and Salisbury is a very just one; both were built in the then new First Pointed style, but there is no doubt about the superiority of Salisbury in either design or completeness.