The proverb that “the old order changeth, giving place to new,” is most strikingly emphasised in the appearance and history of any great Cathedral. Each successive abbot seems here, as elsewhere, to have desired to do something much better than that done by his predecessors; and so we find Abbot John de Cella, in 1195, with the particularly inadequate sum of one hundred marks left for the purpose by the last abbot, beginning to rebuild Abbot Paul’s gigantic church. De Cella was a supreme artist, but unhappily an idealist who did not count the cost of what he was doing. He pulled down the West Front, and began to rebuild it in the Early English style. Before he had done more than get in the foundations of his new work, bang went the hundred marks, with much else: a circumstance which led the historian, Matthew de Paris, to gibe cruelly at him; saying, very caustically, he wondered the abbot had not recollected the ancient proverb,—“That he who is about to build should compute the cost, lest all begin to jeer at him, saying, ‘This man _began_ to build, and was unable to finish it.’” How de Cella tried in every direction to raise money for his works is a pitiful story: how he visited, travelled, petitioned, and begged, first of one person, and then of another; how he was “looked coldly upon” and snubbed. Finally, after a great number of years, during which the works were only spasmodically in progress, de Cella died, in 1214, with the porches of his West Front only half finished. The Early English architecture of de Cella remained, a lovely specimen of the artistic feeling of the period, until 1882, when Lord Grimthorpe destroyed it, on the excuse that it was decayed and could not be made good by modern workmen: building a West Front of his own, in a style which has justly been called “Dissenting Gothic.” William de Trumpington succeeded de Cella as abbot, and in his one-and-twenty years rebuilt four bays on the north side of the nave and five on the south, in the Early English style. Five others on the south side are of the Decorated period, and are the work of Abbot Eversden, in the fourteenth century. The remainder of the nave is the original gaunt early Norman. It would be a lengthy treatise that should duly tell the architectural and other history of St. Albans Cathedral: and this is not the place for so prolonged an exercise. Let it be sufficient, then, to tell something of the things done to the fabric in modern times, in the name of “restoration.”