succeeding abbots, for about two hundred years, and until Abbot _Simon Ripley_ virtually completed, in 1492, the erection of the Cathedral as we see it in the present day. Only fifty years afterwards, the foul blast of destruction fell like an avalanche upon the monastic institutions of Britain—Chester among the number. Bluff King Hal, that shameless polygamist, in a fit of pretended religious zeal, dissolved all these fraternities, and, pocketing the spoil, dealt out their lands to his creatures with right royal munificence. True, he left us the _shell_, in his new foundation of a Cathedral and Chapter; but he gulped up the _kernel_ in the shape of the manorial possessions of the Abbey. John Bird was the first peculiar Bishop of Chester; and Thomas Clarke transposed himself from the last Romanist Abbot to the first Protestant Dean of Chester. Entering the CATHEDRAL by the South Porch, we find ourselves in the NAVE, and close to a lofty chamber now used as the Consistory Court. Here are tried, before the chancellor of the diocese, the validity or otherwise of disputed wills, actions for slander, and other causes falling within the province of ecclesiastical law. Beyond, and to the left of this Court, near the baptismal font, is the great West Entrance of the Cathedral, built during the energetic rule of the Abbot Simon Ripley. It was the design of Ripley to erect two massive towers at this end of the Cathedral, and the foundations of these towers are still existing there; but owing to an unexpected “fall in the funds,” or to some other cause, the original intention was never carried out.