If the restored
retablo over the high altar is disappointing in its sophistication,
we have only to pass into the Feretory to discover certain marvellous
fragments of the original reredos which are so beautiful that they take
away our breath--that broken statue of the Madonna and Child, for
instance, perhaps the loveliest piece of fourteenth century sculpture
to be found in England. No, however we consider the great church of
Winchester, it stands alone. As a mere building it is more tremendous
and more venerable than anything now left to us upon English soil; as a
burial place it possesses the dust not only of the Apostle of the heart
of England but of the greatest of the Saxon kings, while beneath its
mighty vault William Rufus sleeps, the only Norman king that lies in
England. And as a shrine of art it still possesses incomparable things.
It stands there as the Pyramids stand in the desert, a relic of a lost
civilisation; but by it we may measure the modern world.
It is, too, when you consider it, utterly lonely. The revolution we
call the Reformation upon which the modern world turns and turns as
upon a pivot, while it spared Winchester Cathedral, though reluctantly,
swept away all the buildings which surrounded it.
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