general sense of the beauty and grandeur in it which no English
cathedral is without. The morning was fitly dim and chill, and
one could move about in the vague all the more comfortably for
the absence of that appeal of thronging monuments which harasses
and bewilders the visitor in other cathedrals; one could really
give one's self up to serious emotion, and not be sordidly and
rapaciously concerned with objects of interest. Manchester has
been an episcopal see only some fifty years; before that the
cathedral was simply T' Owd Church, and in this character it is
still venerable, and is none the less so because of the statue of
Oliver Cromwell which holds the chief place in the open square
before it. Call it an incongruity, if you will, but that enemy of
episcopacy is at least not accused of stabling his horses in The
Old Church at Manchester, or despoiling it of its sacred images
and stained glass, and he merits a monument there if anywhere.

[Illustration: MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL]

With the constantly passing trams which traverse the square, he
is undoubtedly more significant of modern Manchester than the
episcopacy is, and perhaps of that older Manchester which held
for him against the king, and that yet older Manchester of John
Bradford, the first martyr of the Reformation to suffer death at
the stake in Smithfield. Of the still yet older, far older
Manchester, which trafficked with the Greeks of Marseilles, and
later passed under the yoke of Agricola and was a Roman military
station, and got the name of Maen-ceaster from the Saxons, and
was duly bedevilled by the Danes and mishandled by the Normans,
there may be traces in the temperament of the modern town which
would escape even the scrutiny of the hurried American. Such a