Nor need we indulge in unavailing regrets. It is impossible not to wish that much which has been ruthlessly destroyed had been spared, and that many things of beauty could be recovered. We could wish that the unhallowed fingers which hesitated not even to rifle the very graves, had been checked, that the fires of 1829 and 1840 had not swept over the choir and nave; but enough survives to gladden eye and heart with the noblest evidences of mediæval work and taste, and tokens on every side abound to testify that, in these latter days, Yorkshiremen have been as ready to repair the decay of age, restore the ravages of fire, and support the glory and dignity of God's house as ever they were in days gone by. We walk about our Zion and go round about her and tell the towers thereof, and they speak to us of a living faith, not of an effete ecclesiasticism or of mere archæological interest. We rejoice that it is still emphatically a house of prayer, not only when "two or three are gathered together," but when its aisles are thronged with a vast multitude, uniting in some special act of prayer and praise, or listening to some eloquent exponent of the Gospel of peace; and "when through the long drawn aisle and fretted vault the pealing anthem swells the notes of praise," we lift up grateful hearts in devout unison, that we are permitted to worship Him in this His house on earth, and desiring that we may be permitted to attain to the "building of God, the house not made with hands eternal in the heavens." [Illustration: Perpendicular Shell-Ornament Piscina] _Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. _London & Edinburgh_