The doorway to the chapel is very beautiful, and its foliated ornament well worthy of study. The internal dimensions are about 90 feet by 30--a favourite size, it would seem, and not differing much from the dimensions of St. Stephen’s Chapel, that at Temple Balsal, or the Sainte Chapelle at Paris (reckoning the latter in French feet). The architecture of the chapel is nearly allied to that of a series of sepulchral monuments I alluded to in my former lecture, and some of them again in this. One of these is that of its own founder at Ely; the second and third are those of Edmund and Aveline, at Westminster Abbey; and the fourth is that of Archbishop Peckham, at Canterbury. All these date between 1290 and 1300, and are works of exquisite beauty and of the richest decorative art. I will now lead you on a short excursion out of London, to a glorious old temple which was, in the days of my pupilage, considered to be within walking distance, and can now be reached in less than an hour by railway. I mean the venerable Abbey Church of St. Alban. You probably know the general history of this church: founded over the tomb of the protomartyr of England, within ten years of his martyrdom, and rebuilt on a larger scale by Offa, King of Mercia, it was again rebuilt of its present enormous dimensions by the earlier of the Norman abbots, using the materials excavated from the ruined city of Verulam. The Roman brick was not a material very suggestive of ornamental architecture, and we accordingly find the original portions to be plain and massive in the extreme, but, nevertheless, highly impressive and interesting. In the work of a later Norman abbot we find this unshapely material cased with stone-work, and of richly decorative details; but the church in general retained its severe simplicity undisturbed till the accession of Abbot John De Cella, in the reign of King Richard I. This worthy abbot was more a man of taste than of business, and his temperament more sanguine than calculating. He had no sooner taken possession of the abbacy than he embarked on a magnificent project for rebuilding the western façade of his abbey church; only a prelude, probably, to the reconstruction of the whole in the new style.