place of historical memories and a wilderness. Nature had made it a
sweet and beautiful spot; the earth over the old buried ruins was
covered with an elastic turf, jewelled with the bright little flowers of
the chalk, the ramparts and ditches being all overgrown with a dense
thicket of thorn, holly, elder, bramble, and ash, tangled up with ivy,
briony, and traveller's-joy. Once only during the last five or six
centuries some slight excavations were made when, in 1834, as the result
of an excessively dry summer, the lines of the cathedral foundations
were discernible on the surface. But it will no longer be the place it
was, the Society of Antiquaries having received permission from the Dean
and Chapter of Salisbury to work their sweet will on the site. That
ancient, beautiful carcass, which had long made their mouths water, on
which they have now fallen like a pack of hungry hyenas to tear off the
old hide of green turf and burrow down to open to the light or drag out
the deep, stony framework. The beautiful surrounding thickets, too, must
go, they tell me, since you cannot turn the hill inside out without
destroying the trees and bushes that crown it. What person who has known
it and has often sought that spot for the sake of its ancient
associations, and of the sweet solace they have found in the solitude,
or for the noble view of the sacred city from its summit, will not
deplore this fatal amiability of the authorities, this weak desire to
please every one and inability to say no to such a proposal!

But let me now return to the object which brings me to this spot; it was
not to lament the loss of the beautiful, which cannot be preserved in
our age--even this best one of all which Salisbury possessed cannot be
preserved--but to look at Salisbury from this point of view. It is not
as from "the meadows" a view of the cathedral only, but of the whole
town, amidst its circle of vast green downs. It has a beautiful aspect
from that point: a red-brick and red-tiled town, set low on that