I will call attention to one other object in the Abbey--I mean the remarkably ancient retable or movable reredos formerly belonging to the high altar. It is a wonderful work of art, and I call attention to it especially in this place, because it contains the most beautiful specimen of very early painting remaining in this country. The pictures are probably by an Italian artist, several of whom are known to have been brought over about this time; but I confess I have seen no work of its age in Italy which I thought equal to it, an opinion confirmed by an Italian professor of architecture to whom I once showed it. It is, I believe, contemporary with the early days of Giotto. I will now pass on to a far humbler building, and one very little known or visited; I mean the Chapel of St. Etheldreda, in Ely Place, Holborn. This was the chapel of the splendid town palace of the Bishops of Ely, and was built by Bishop De Luda soon after 1290. The destruction of the palace you will, I dare say, recollect to have been celebrated by Pugin in his “Contrasts.” It was sold during the last century, and the present untempting-looking street built on its site--a place where one would as little expect to find a gem of ancient art as the ripe strawberries which Dickon of Gloucester saw growing there and begged for. The chapel is in a wretched plight; its side windows have lost both tracery and mullions, its west window is in great measure boarded up, the cradled roof plastered, the whole galleried around and fitted up with pewing which would disgrace a tabernacle of the last century; yet through all this its beauty still shows. The chapel is, as was so usual with private chapels, elevated on an overground crypt, so as to bring it to a level with the principal apartments of the palace. Curiously enough, this crypt is not vaulted, but has over it the original floor of massive timber. The east and west windows, of five lights each, are among the finest of their period and size.[50] The side windows, denuded of their tracery, retain, internally, their beautiful jamb mouldings, and the wall between them has a graceful canopied and crocketed panel to each intervening pier, which gives the sides a very rich effect. I had long and often lamented their mutilated condition, and was one day trying to get at some clue to the design of their tracery, by examining the scars where it had been amputated, when the thought struck me that the two westernmost of them being blocked up by the adjoining houses, might, if opened out, be found to retain their decorative features. I applied for permission to do this; and what was my delight, on removing the material which obstructed them, to find the old window--mutilated, indeed, and shattered--but still retaining every element needful to the restoration of its design! [Illustration: Fig. 115.--Side Windows, Chapel of St. Etheldreda, Ely Place, Holborn.]