Winchester is, of course, as it
ever has been, the county-town of Hampshire, but it still maintains
itself as it has done now these many years chiefly by reason of these
two great establishments.
Certainly to-day the traveller's earliest steps are turned towards
these two buildings, and first to that which is in its foundation near
eight hundred years the older--the Cathedral church once of St Swithin,
the Bishop and Confessor (852-863) and now since the Reformation of the
Holy Trinity.
To come out of the sloping High Street past the ancient city Cross,
through the narrow passage-way into the precincts, and to pass down
that great avenue of secular limes across the Close to the great porch
of the Cathedral, is to come by an incomparable approach to perhaps the
most noble and most venerable church left to us in England. The most
venerable--not I think the most beautiful. No one remembering the Abbey
of Westminster can claim that for it, and then, though it possesses the
noblest Norman work in England and the utmost splendour of the
Perpendicular, it lacks almost entirely and certainly the best of the
Early English.
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