[Illustration:  In the choir of King’s college chapel.  This Chapel and that of Henry VII at Westminster and St. George’s at Windsor, are the finest examples of the gorgeous fan tracery belonging to the last phase of English gothic architecture.]

Owing to the extreme uniformity of the exterior of the chapel the eye seems to take in all there is to see in one sweeping vision, refusing subconsciously to look individually at each of the twelve identical bays, each with its vast window of regularly repeated design.  But there are some things it would be a pity to pass over, for to do so would be to fail to appreciate the profound skill of the mediaeval architects and craftsmen who could rear a marvellous stone roof upon walls so largely composed of glass.  In this building, like its only two rivals in the world—­St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle and Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster—­the wall space between the windows has shrunk to the absolute minimum; in fact, nothing is left beyond the bare width required for the buttresses, and to build those reinforcements with sufficient strength to take the thrust of a vaulted stone roof must have required consummate capacity and skill.  At Eton, where, however, the stone roof was never built, the buttresses planned to carry it appear so enormous that the building seems to be all buttress, but here such an impression could never for a moment be gained, for the chapel filling each bay completely masks the widest portion of the adjoining buttresses.  The upper portions are so admirably proportioned that they taper up to a comparatively slight finial with the most perfect gradations.

Directly we enter the chapel our eyes are raised to look at the roof which necessitated that stately row of buttresses, but for a time it is hard to think of anything but the splendour of colour and detail in this vast aisleless nave, and we think of what Henry’s college might have been had the whole plan been carried out in keeping with this perfect work.  Wordsworth’s familiar lines present themselves as more fitting than prose to describe this consummation of the pain and struggle of generations of workers since the dawn of Gothic on English soil: 

     Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense,
     With ill-matched aims the architect who planned—­
     Albeit labouring for a scanty band
     Of white-robed Scholars only—­this immense
     And glorious work of fine intelligence! 
     Give all thou canst; high heaven rejects the lore
     Of nicely-calculated less or more;
     So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense
     These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof
     Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells,
     Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
     Lingering—­and wandering on as loth to die;
     Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
     That they were born for immortality.