collision of mind with mind, and progress by antagonism, into an ecclesiastical centre.

*

There was on record a synodical decision of the English Church, which had ruled the removal of certain bishoprics from villages to cities. In compliance with this decision, which had been arrived at by a Synod held at London under Lanfranc in 1075, Sherborne and Ramsbury had already been transferred to Old Sarum, Wells to Bath, Selsey to Chichester, Lichfield to Chester, Dorchester to Lincoln, and Elmham to Thetford. Herbert then was moving in a groove already cut for him by the councils of his Church, when he determined to transfer his seat from Thetford, a city now on the wane, to Norwich, a town daily rising in importance.'

But he was not satisfied with removing the see. The Norman ecclesiastics had two strong traditions: their episcopal see was to be a great centre, marked by a powerful display of religious activity and monastic life; and this was to be manifested to the public eye by a fitting cathedral church of vast size and grand proportions. Wherever they settled, their first thoughts were to plant and discipline a colony of monks, and to embody their ideas of grandeur in an edifice of new magnificence. It did not matter if they could only build part of it, so that the scale and plans were worthy of what a cathedral ought to be. Herbert brought with him Norman ideas about church-building. As a matter of course, having settled at Norwich, his first thought, after having procured grants of land for his foundations, was to raise the huge piers and massive arches of a church which should be worthy of his bishopric. That church was to grow in the course of ages into the present Cathedral of Norwich.

In planning and rearing this noble structure, Herbert fell in with the taste of his age. There was a rage for magnificent edifices, by which he, in common with many of his contemporaries, seems to have been seized. The wealthier proprietors of those days either reared castles for purposes of state or security, or else sought to expiate the misdeeds of a life of violence and rapine, and to promote the interests of religion, by founding great monastic piles. Rochester, Chichester, and Durham Cathedrals, the crypt of Conrad's Choir at Canterbury, St. Alban's Abbey, parts of Norwich Castle, and the church of Castle Rising in Norfolk, are all works of Herbert's age. Conrad's Choir was commenced in the same year as our cathedral. The Red King himself, who was then upon the throne, set the fashion of sumptuous architecture to his wealthier subjects. He threw a wall round the Tower and a bridge over the Thames, and bequeathed to posterity, to attest the magnificence of his architectural designs, not only Westminster Hall, but the saying in regard to it-that, "vast as it was, it was only the vestibule of the palace he intended to rear."

Little thought he that a later generation would view his saying in the light of a suggestion, and convert that sumptuous hall into the vestibule of the Houses of Parliament, which go under the name of the National Palace of Westminster.'

Norwich Cathedral, as we see it, is much altered from what was planned and built by its founder. Its long history, and its present features, form the subject of a richly-illustrated work, which is a monument of the public spirit, the industry, and the learning of the head of its Chapter, Dean Goulburn, and of the zeal and love with which his noble church has inspired him. Norwich Cathedral possesses a unique and most interesting feature in a series of sculptures, representing in great fulness the events of Scripture history from the Creation to the time of Solomon, and then, with an intervening break, missing out the separate kingdoms of Israel and Judah, from the birth of our Lord to the Last Judgment. These events are represented in the bosses of the stone roof of the nave, put up in the fifteenth century by Bishop Walter Lehart (1446-1472). The series is like an amply illustrated Bible. Each bay contains eighteen bosses, each of which has a separate subject: of the fourteen bays, seven, and three bosses of the eighth, are devoted to the Old Testament history, and the remainder to the New Testament; the fourteenth, which has twenty-one bosses, being taken up entirely by the Judgment. Thus over 250 subjects are represented. They have been recently examined closely, cleaned from dirt and whitewash, and the traces of their original colouring brought out and in some instances renewed. To do this, scaffolding had to be put up, and thus an opportunity was gained, which Dean Goulburn has used, of obtaining accurate photographic copies of them. He justly thought that so remarkable a work was worth publishing, both as an illustration of the ideas of art and the ideas of religion of the age to which the sculptures belong-the age of the beginning of painting in Italy and Flanders, the age which was preparing for Savonarola and the Reformation. He accordingly proposed to himself a work on the Ancient Sculptures in the Roof of Norwich Cathedral,' exhibiting them in careful photographs, and accompanying the catalogue of them with explanations of his own and illustrative extracts bearing on their subjects, and relieving the dryness of a mere enumeration. But his work grew on him and the folio volume into which it developed has grouped round the account of the biblical sculptures a pretty full history of the bishops of Norwich to the middle of the sixteenth century; of the cathedral which they added to, restored, and ornamented; and of the principal events of general or local interest connected with the cathedral and its rulers.

6

Bishop Herbert only built what was the nucleus of all that we now see at Norwich; yet his work, at least inside, still gives its dominant character to the appearance of the cathedral. That grand massive Norman interior, with its huge piers, with the round apse of the choir, and the aisle going all round it, with the outspringing side chapels of the choir-(the Lady chapel at its end has been destroyed)—and, above all, the Bishop's stone chair at the extreme end of the choir that ancient basilican arrangement so rarely adopted, at least so rarely preserved, in the West, all have the stamp of Herbert's ideas and witness to his designs. The apsidal ending of the choir, so common abroad, so unusual now in England, where an original apse as built by the Normans has generally given place to the square east end and its great east window, recals in its general plan, as Dean Goulburn reminds us, the features of Herbert's old Norman abbey of Fécamp, whose architecture is said to have influenced Lincoln as it influenced Norwich.* And we can see in the scale and proportions of the building, which he seems to have completed from the east end as far as the third bay of the nave, the proof that he had fully caught the Norman enthusiasm to mark their occupation of England by introducing a grander manner of building into the country, and by raising structures which visitors from abroad should find not less imposing and majestic than the great churches of France and Normandy.

The interest which he took in the building is shown in several of his letters, written to the prior and monks to spur on their flagging zeal in the work.

I cannot forbear to express my anxieties, and my countenance indicates externally the fever which consumes me within; for I am not of that sort of men who speak in the heart and in the heart [only}, but that which I conceive in my mind, my features and my speech at once give birth to [and bring to light]. This is the case more especially when I see that the business which I have in hand was entered upon from a love of law and justice. I am quite disposed to unbend [in due season], but not in the things pertaining to God.

'I love you, and I am striving to deliver you, slow and indolent as you are, out of the hands of the Divine severity. Often have I stirred you up in person, by reminding you both privately and publicly of your duty in this respect, to apply yourselves fervently and diligently to the work of your church, and to show carefulness in that work, as done under the inspection of God's own eyes. I was wont to entreat and to persuade you; and would that I had succeeded in convincing your minds how great is the sincerity with which God

must

must be served! But, alas! the work drags on; and in providing materials you show no enthusiasm. Behold, the servants of the king and my own are really earnest in the works allotted to them,-gather stones, carry them to the spot when gathered, and fill with them the fields and ways, the houses and courts; and you meanwhile are asleep with folded hands, numbed, as it were, and frostbitten by a winter of negligence, shuffling and failing in your duty through a paltry love of ease.

'Pluck up heart once more; lift up the hands that hang down and strengthen the feeble knees; ye are striving for the mastery in a conflict; labour ye for the palm. The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come, that shall be revealed in us.'

So in a postscript:

'Attack forthwith the foundations of the [cathedral] towers with all alacrity, as ye hope to repose with true devotion on Christ, Who is our tower of strength. Peace be to you and to all our brethren.'

Bishop Herbert's name appears in various transactions of King Henry's time. With most of the other bishops he began by taking the King's part against Anselm; but the tide turned, and he ended by throwing himself on Anselm's side. He echoed Anselm's severe tone in assailing the gross immorality of the time; but there was always something of the waverer about him. Some of his friends seem to have thought of him as a successor to Anselm. Late in life he was employed in an embassy to Rome, to settle the rival pretensions of the great sees of Canterbury and York; but it was a toilsome journey, which nearly killed him, and which produced no result. He died in 1119, ten years after Anselm, and a year after the death of Queen Matilda, for whom he wrote devotional compositions, and whose funeral he attended.

Dean Goulburn has performed a pious task towards his founder. There are not many of Bishop Herbert's contemporaries about whom so much trouble has been taken by bishops and deans of our own day. His biographer has given to readers ample means of testing the judgment on his character given in these volumes. We cannot ourselves put him as high as Dean Goulburn does. The Bishop seems to us one of that numerous class of persons who for the most part reflect the sentiment or opinion which for the time asserts itself most strongly. He began with timeserving and simony, for it was the custom round him. Anselm's earnestness fairly frightened him into more serious ways. He must have the credit of having recognized what was best among the people round him; but he was a follower, not a leader. We cannot see the evidence of the amiability or the extreme sensi

tiveness

tiveness of conscience which the Dean ascribes to him: the language of compunction and self-humiliation in his letters is too conventional to carry the proof of this sensitiveness very high. We cannot but think that the value of the picture consists in this that it shows us, not a man in advance of his time, but one who was exactly on a level with it; who has not too much individuality or independence of character, either for good or for evil, to be an unfair example of what men at the time might rise to or sink to that he is a fair gauge of the ordinary virtues or ordinary faults of his generation, of its ordinary sentiments, its ordinary cultivation, its ordinary public spirit; and all this, with sufficient proportion of the subordinate qualities of character-in his case, liveliness, a certain sense of humour, a sly power of address and coaxing, a turn for magnificence-to relieve the dulness of what is commonplace and usual, and to give sprightliness and truthfulness to the representation.

ART. V.-Lettres et Opuscules inédits du Comte Joseph de Maistre. 6th Edition. 2 vols. Paris, 1873.

LWAYS,' says Goethe, contradicting a popular modern tenet, always it is the individual that works for progress, not the age. It was the age, which made away with Socrates by poison; it was the age, which burnt Huss at the stake; the ages have always been the same.'

We listen to Goethe with respect, yet we cannot help remembering that it has been said, on the other hand: There is somebody who is cleverer even than Voltaire, cleverer than any man you can name; this somebody is all the world, tout le monde. Nor is that a bad saving, either. But it is not really at variance with the saving of Goethe. Only we must guard it a little, must explain that the all the world which is cleverer than the cleverest individual is not the world of his contemporaries, but the world which comes after him, and which he has contributed to form. He was not perfect, he did not see the whole truth; there were at work other eminent individualities besides his; other aspects of the truth were seen besides the aspect which he saw. There was confrontation and collision, and out of the shock came the next age, an all the world clearer and cleverer, in many respects, than even the chief individuals of the age preceding. But to these individuals and to their shock it owes all its advance, Individuals emerging from its own life, again, superior to their age, contradicted by it and contradicting