great alterations in the fabric and fittings had either happened already or were yet to come.

During the deanery of Brian Duppa in 1630, the unhappy church suffered a sweeping restoration, which well-nigh destroyed its ecclesiastical character altogether. As Dean Duppa was a cultured man himself, and wrote a life of Michael Angelo, his work was all the more disastrous,—a mere Philistine would have probably been content to let well alone. To begin with, he, "being minded to adorn it," says Wood, "did first take down all the old stalls in the choir, and in their places put up those that now are," those great ugly pews, that is, which Dean Liddell removed. Then, in laying down his new pavement, he removed many of the old monuments, "having most of them," continues the old antiquary, "Saxon inscriptions on them; which being looked upon by the dean and canons as old superfluous stuff, and unhandsome to be mixed with their new pavement, they did cause them to be thrown out of the church, as also those out of the cloister." The remaining monuments he moved to the aisles, having, with two exceptions, "duly deprived them of their brasses." Thus was a priceless record of the priory's history lost to us. Most of his work has during this century been undone; but one memorial of him remains, a valuable historical landmark, and full of the characteristics of its age—the Jonah window at the west of the north aisle of the nave.

In order that the windows of the aisles might be "beautified with glass, admirably well performed by the exquisite hand of Abraham Ling, a Dutchman, an. 1634," Brian Duppa and his chapter altered the whilom Perpendicular windows, sawing away "the fine architecture or crustation of those windows," and changing them from three lights with tracery to two plain lights, the author of the "Anatomy of Melancholy" being the donor of part of the new glass. The priceless old glass, which had been set up by ancient priors of St. Frideswide's, and contained pictures of the life of "The Lady," besides the arms of many benefactors, was ruthlessly sacrificed. This act of vandalism has led to still more unfortunate reprisals in our own time; for Van Ling's old glass, which had great merits, was taken away at the last restoration, and replaced by some entirely uninteresting modern stuff (to say the least of it), while the tracery was remade into a respectable nineteenth century parody of the original Perpendicular.

The amiable and terrible Duppa also ruined the Decorated windows of three lights which terminated the aisles of the choir by converting them into his favourite two-light windows; and the beautiful four-light window of the Lady Chapel was similarly treated. The great north transept window was likewise impoverished in its tracery; and at the end of the seventeenth century the great east window was reduced from five to three lights by the same curious and unaccountable perversion of taste. One more memorial of Dean Duppa defaced the cathedral down to our time. This was the strange arrangement of stone screens by which the eastern chapels were separated from the transepts, and the most romantic feature of the church destroyed. They were particularly offensive, as they finished in a half-circle turned upwards, so that, with the Norman arch above, a complete circle was formed. However, the fine pulpit and organ-screen must be set down to the credit of this period.

Dean Duppa's successors signalised themselves, as far as the cathedral is concerned, only by the erection of monuments, some gruesome, and all heavy. Their work for the college was more considerable, and we shall enumerate it in our chapter on the Exterior.

A great deal of mischief was done to the painted glass during the Civil War, many of the windows being destroyed, and not one left quite perfect; but otherwise the church escaped pretty well. Indeed, in this orderly country a great deal more damage has been done by lawful authority than by popular riots.

Up till Dean Liddell's time the cathedral was in as bad a state as most of the other cathedrals of England. A writer in the "Ecclesiologist" for February 1847 thus bewails its then condition:—

"We now come to the present estate of the cathedral, which is more deplorable than can be imagined. It is really wonderful that the cathedral of an English diocese, and the chapel of one of our greatest colleges, should remain in a condition which would disgrace the meanest hamlet. In the first place, it will hardly be credited by those whose eyes have not witnessed the sacrilege, that a portion of the church is actually desecrated. In so vast a college the hire of a single room cannot be dispensed with, but the House of God must be defiled; a bay of the south transept and one of the adjoining chapels are blocked off to form a residence for the verger. On this subject we can hardly trust ourselves to speak.

"The fittings up of the choir are of the most wretched and irreverent description. The stalls are of seventeenth century work, and by no means a favourable specimen: those of the dean and canons are marked by canopies. The episcopal throne is meanness itself, and can hardly be distinguished without a most diligent search: on the prayer-books nearest to it, and nowhere else, are inscribed the words 'Christ-church Chapel,' as if to warn the Bishop off the forbidden ground. Nearly the whole area of the choir between the stalls is filled with benches looking west, and in which kneeling is all but impossible. These are occupied by the overgrown mass of undergraduates, and at the 'canons' prayers' partly by choristers. Further, that not an inch of available space may be lost, an arch on each side is blocked up by a gallery, which at surplice-prayers, when the students and commoners attend, is filled by the choir thus displaced. Finally, behind the stalls are some darksome dens, occupied by women, which greatly encumber the choir aisles. The screen [then blocking up the choir] is a cumbrous piece of work contemporary with the stalls, but of better character: it supports, of course, a vast and unsightly organ. The miserable appearance which is thus produced in this really noble chancel is almost indescribable. The whole seems so narrowed and confined; one feels pent in without the least scope for one's energies. Of the service performed within the degraded choir we can only trust ourselves to say that it is the most slovenly and irreverent that we have ever witnessed in any English cathedral."

The stalls seem to have been particularly bad. The "Gentleman's Magazine" for 1856 says that "the choir aisles and the chapels were also excluded from view, and almost from any participation in the service, by the box-like framing, which rose to the height of eleven feet from the paving." Of course, all this had caused serious damage to the architecture: the pillars on the north and south side of the choir were, for instance, squared, and their bases cut away; thus mutilated they had been "encased with heavily moulded Italian framing intermixed with some remnants of Jacobean workmanship."

But since the fifties the appearance of the cathedral has been completely changed. Dean Liddell began the restoration in 1856, when Mr. John Billing was employed to repair some parts of the walls that had become unsafe, and to remove the galleries and high pews. The work then done was only temporary; the reseating whereby decent accommodation was provided for the whole college was managed out of the old woodwork, not a plank being taken out or carried into the church; the organ was moved for the time into the south transept, so that the choir could be thrown open to the nave, and other work of a simple and necessary character carried through.

In 1870, Dean Liddell employed Sir G. Gilbert Scott to carry on the great restoration, whereby very considerable changes were wrought in the fabric itself.