last words, refers several times to this vestibule, always in terms of the highest praise, and gives "restored views" from two positions.1 The eight north windows of the nave of St. Mary's are among the chief glories of English Gothic. They exhibit a remarkable alternation of two designs, viz. first a single mullion dividing two trefoil-headed lights, with a sexfoil in the head of the arch, and then three trefoil-headed lights divided by two mullions and surmounted by three quatrefoils. Of these eight windows, the three nearest the transept are distinguished by filleted mouldings. The gardens of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society enclose, besides the nave and chapter-house of St. Mary's, two remarkable ruins, which help to redeem the commonplace trimness of the scene. These are the celebrated Roman "multangular tower," and some fragments of the Hospital of St. Leonard. The latter includes a thirteenth-century chapel of great beauty, which is almost certainly the work of John Romanus, the treasurer of the Minster and builder of its northern transept. It is difficult now to picture what must have been the general effect of this chapel, with its adjoining dorter, and many-aisled substructure of 1 A fragment of a palace built by Archbishop Rogers (1154 to 1181) on the north side of the Minster should be compared. cloister or ambulatory.1 The present picturesque condition of the ruin is shown in the accompanying sketch. For architects and antiquaries, even more than for artists, York is indeed a very paradise, and yet the wild cliff at Whitby, and the stillness of Byland, recall with stronger spell that Benedictine spirit which once swayed the Christian world. 1 It is clear that, as in the normal Benedictine infirmary, the patients slept in a room directly communicating with their oratory. An analogous arrangement may be seen in Lord Beauchamp's Almshouse at Newland, near Malvern. II RIEVAULX "IN the reign of Henry I. flourished St. Barnard, Abbot of Clareval, a man full of devotion, and chief of many monks, some of whom he sent into England about 1128, who were honourably received by both king and kingdom; and particularly by Walter l'Espec, who, about 1131, allotted to some of them a solitary place in Blakemore, near Hamelac, now Helmesley, surrounded by steep hills and covered with wood and ling, near the angles of the three different vales, with each a rivulet running through them; that passing by where the Abbey was built being called Rie, whence this vale took its name, and that religious house was thence called Rie-val." A great name and a great event are these which the author of the Yorkshire " "Monasticon" recounts so quietly-St. Bernard of Clairvaux and the coming of the Cistercians. The name at least our readers know. |