employed about the Cathedral, upon whom its impress has visibly descended; quaint imps in Elizabethan ruffles playing a seemingly sedate game upon the lawn while their companions are singing in the choir; the ordinary sightseers who, apart from bank holidays, always seem to arrive at the same times and in the same twos and threes, and put on, as do the inevitable butchers’ and bakers’ youths, a cloak of decorous quiet when they enter the guardian gateways.

[Illustration:  HIGH STREET GATE.]

The Cathedral was commenced in 1220 by Bishop Poore and took about forty years to build, but this period did not include the erection of the tower and spire which were later additions.  The fine and generally admired west front is, from an architect’s point of view, the only part of the exterior that is not admirable.  It is in actual fact, fraudulent, just as the whole of the upper wall of St. Paul’s Cathedral is an artistic untruth.  The west wall of Salisbury is a screen without professing to be one.  The porches are very small in relation to the great flattish expanse of masonry above them; the dullness of this was much relieved by the series of statues placed in the empty niches about the middle of the last century.  The original medieval figures almost all disappeared through the zeal of the Puritans.

Even the most careless glance down the long outline of the walls, artistically broken by the two transepts, but never losing the regular continuity of design, will show the observer that this perfect Early English building was an inspiration of one brain and that the many hands that worked for that brain carried out their tasks as a religious rite.  The glory of the tower as we see it was not part of the original plan, though that undoubtedly included some such crown and consummation of the noble work beneath.  But although the tower and spire are of a later period—­the Decorated, they blend so harmoniously with the earlier building that all might have arisen in one twelve months instead of being labours spread over one hundred years.  The rash courage which raised this great pyramid of stone, four hundred and four feet above the sward, on the slender columns and walls that have actually bowed under the great weight they uphold, has often been commented upon.  It has been said that the tower would have fallen long ago had it not been for the original scaffolding that remains within to tie and strengthen it.  In the eighteenth century a leaden casket was discovered by some workmen high in the spire, containing a relic of our Lady, to whom the Cathedral is dedicated.  In the summer of 1921 the steeplejacks employed to test the lightning conductor found that the iron cramps had rusted to such an extent as to split the stonework.  A band of iron within the base of the spire in process of rusting is said to have raised the great mass of stone fully half an inch.  The iron is now being replaced by gun-metal.