The blending of influences is again very marked, but the dominant thought is that of one of the inmates of the great abbatial House. The signature "Robert" (anno 1334) does not help us. This was the year that witnessed the election of John de Breynton as Abbot, vice Adam de Sodbury, and it was an era of great building activities. But Robert speaks, or is made to speak, for those of an era two hundred years later, or nearly, and it is strange to find a voice from the fourteenth century recalling the "window" as it then was, and going on to describe alterations made at the beginning of the sixteenth. And the allusion to Abbot Beere's living influence is of peculiar interest. Among the best modern exponents of the Gothic English styles, the call of the past, and the influence of the past, is vital as an element in their work, and it is precisely in the measure in which they are able to translate the spirit of the past, that they can claim inspiration in what they strive to produce.[19] Occasionally a sincere student will obtain some mental pictures of a bygone time of singular clearness and fidelity, whence, he knows not; only that they are spontaneously apparent to him _when in a state of mental passivity after intellectual exertion in the particular direction needed_. It may be of interest here to quote an experience once related to the writer by an old friend, W., now retired from practice, but who in the 80's of the last century was responsible for a good deal of scholarly restoration work in the west country. W. was very partial to the Early English forms, and if he had a fault, it was the fault of his day, when restorers were a little ruthless, as we should think nowadays, in substituting Early English detail for the fifteenth century "vernacular" of the district. On one occasion he was called upon to undertake "restoration"--which, in this case, meant a partial rebuilding--of a decayed church in the very decayed town of I. The south wall of the nave, a work of the ordinary "Perpendicular" sort, had to be rebuilt, and he had to construct a new arcade for the aisle adjoining. Somehow he felt disinclined to do this in the fifteenth-century style, but was prompted to design afresh, in the manner of the thirteenth. And for his pillars he imagined a form of capital having rather a complex moulding. There was nothing visible to guide him, but it appealed to him as suitable. Nor was it a local type--at least, this would be the writer's recollection of the impression he derived from the drawing which W. showed him. [19] The work of the mere copyist is not inspired.