An odd and entirely inexplicable device is found outside the four eastern windows of the choir clerestory, north and south, in the placing of the triforium passage outside the building, and the screening of it and the windows with a great skeleton framework of stone. The reason of this—whether it was a mistaken idea of decoration, or for some structural strengthening purpose—is still to be sought. But the east end is an equally crude and artless piece of work, almost wholly given up to the east window; the small flanking windows looking mean and pinched by comparison, and the abundant decoration characterised by stupid repetition and want of invention. Here we see the Perpendicular style at a very low ebb, and thus it is not altogether a disadvantage that the road is so narrow at this point that a full view of the east end is difficult to obtain. Criticism is at once disarmed on entering. One enters, not by the great portals in the west front, but by the south porch, the most impressive entrance, as it happens. For this is at once the noblest and the earliest portion of the great church, and here, in one magnificent view from south to north we obtain one of the finest architectural vistas in England. Majesty personified, these Early English transepts are in themselves broad and long and lofty enough to furnish a nave for many another cathedral. Spaciousness and nobility of proportion are the notes of them, and even the beautiful nave, with its aisles, light and graceful, loftier and broader than almost any other in the land, dwindles by comparison. They produce in the surprised traveller who first beholds them the rare sensation of satisfaction, of expectations more than realised, and give an uplifting of spirit as thrilling as that caused by some inspiring passage of minstrelsy. To stand at the crossing and gaze upwards into that vast tower which looks so clumsy to the outward view, is to receive an impression of beauty, of combined strength and lightness, which is not to be acquired elsewhere, for it is the finest of lantern towers, and, open to the vaulting of its roof, a hundred and eighty feet above the pavement, its great windows on all sides entrap the sunbeams and shed a diffused glory on arcade and pier. Perhaps one of the most daring attempts at effect is that which confronts the visitor as he enters by the south porch. Daring, not from the constructional, but from the decorative point of view, the five equal-sized lancet windows, the “Five Sisters” that occupy three parts of the space in the wall of the north transept, might so easily have been as glaring a failure as they are a conspicuous success. Their very prominence has doubtless given them their name, and caused the legend to be invented of their having been the gift of five maiden sisters. The beauty of the original Early English glass which still remains in these lancets has a considerable share in producing this successful effect. That the