though I found no point from which a good view of the exterior can be
seen.

It has a very beautiful and rich outside, however, and a lofty tower,
very large and ponderous, but so finished off, and adorned with
pinnacles, and all manner of architectural devices,--wherewith these old
builders knew how to alleviate their massive structures,--that it seems
to sit lightly in the air. The porch was open, and some workmen were
trundling barrows into the nave; so I followed, and found two young women
sitting just within the porch, one of whom offered to show me round the
cathedral. There was a great dust in the nave, arising from the
operations of the workmen. They had been laying a new pavement, and
scraping away the plaster, which had heretofore been laid over the
pillars and walls. The pillars come out from the process as good as
new,--great, round, massive columns, not clustered like those of most
cathedrals; they are twenty-one feet in circumference, and support
semicircular arches. I think there are seven of these columns, on each
side of the nave, which did not impress me as very spacious; and the dust
and racket of the work-people quite destroyed the effect which should
have been produced by the aisles and arches; so that I hardly stopped to
glance at this part, though I saw some mural monuments and recumbent
statues along the walls.

The choir is separated from the nave by the usual screen, and now by a
sail-cloth or something of that kind, drawn across, in order to keep out
the dust, while the repairs are going on. When the young woman conducted
me hither, I was at once struck by the magnificent eastern window, the
largest in England, which fills, or looks vast enough to fill, all that