XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR 191

every morning, to be animated for the highest duties owed to their country, the noblest of English youth. The greater number of the peers of England, and, as a rule, the best of her squirealty, passed necessarily through Christ Church.

The cathedral itself was an epitome of English history. Every stone, every pane of glass, every panel of woodwork, was true, and of its time,-not an accursed sham of architect’s job. The first shrine of St. Frideswide had indeed been destroyed, and her body rent and scattered on the dust by the Puritan;¹ but her second shrine was still beautiful in its kind,-most lovely English work both of heart and hand. The Norman vaults above were true English Norman; bad and rude enough, but the best we could do with our own wits, and no French help. The roof was true Tudor,-grotesque, inventively constructive, delicately carved;² it, with the roof of the hall staircase,³ summing the builder’s skill of the fifteenth century. The west window, with its clumsy painting of the Adoration of the Shepherds, a monument of the transition from window to picture which ended in Dutch pictures of the cattle without either shepherds or Christ,-but still, the best men could do of the day; and the plain final woodwork of the stalls represented still the last art of living England in the form of honest and comfortable carpentry.⁴

219. In this choir, written so closely and consecutively with indisputable British history, met every morning a congregation representing the best of what Britain had become, -orderly, as the crew of a man-of-war, in the goodly ship

¹ [The shrine of St. Frideswide seems to have been moved frequently to different parts of the building. The structure commonly called “the shrine of Frideswide” (date 1480) is now supposed to have been the “watching chamber” of the guard or keeper of the shrine and its offerings. The shrine was removed, but not destroyed, at the Reformation. A brass plate was placed in 1880 over the spot where the shrine once stood.]

² [Of fan-tracery, groined, with pendants-an enrichment attributed to Wolsey.]

³ [With the famous fan-roof springing from a single pillar; built not in the fifteenth century, but for Dean Fell in 1640. Ruskin refers to it in one of his letters on The Oxford Museum: see Vol. XVI. p. 226.]

⁴ [New stalls, executed from Sir Gilbert Scott’s designs, were among the alterations made by Dean Liddell between 1872 and 1875.]

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