the cathedral, like so many pawns round a king
at chess. This building is a small history of
England in itself. It dates back to some early
British king, and was subsequently turned into
a Pagan temple. St. Swithin, Bishop of
Winchester (852-863), was the patron saint whose
relics were here honoured for many centuries.
The worthy man had originally snug lying in
the churchyard, but his successor, Bishop
Athelwold, removed the honoured bones from
a chapel outside the north door of the nave,
and placed them in a glistening golden shrine
behind the cathedral altar. The removal of
the relics was at first frustrated by forty days'
miraculous rain, and it hence became a popular
belief, first in Hampshire, then all over
England, that if there were rain on St. Swithin's
Day (July 15), it would rain for forty days
after, according to the old rhyme:

    St. Swithin's day if thou doth rain,
    For forty days it will remain;
    St. Switnin's day if thou be fair,
    For forty days 'twill rain na mair.

But the crow must for a moment be
biographical. In a recent number he gave a
sketch of the career of an old soldier in the
reign of Henry the Fifth; he will now give an
outline of the life of a prelate in the reign of
Edward the Third. The old cathedral was rebuilt
by Bishop Wakelin, 1079, with Isle of Wight
limestone and Hempage oak. Bishop De Lucy
carried the work further, and Bishop Edington
began the nave that William of Wykeham
continued; and that great statesman lies in
effigy still in his beautiful chantry, arrayed in
cope and mitre, his pillow supported by angels,
and three stone monks praying at his feet.

William of Wykeham, born in 1344, and the
son of poor parents, was educated by Nicolas
Uvedale, governor of Winchester. While
still young he became architect to Edward the
Third, and rebuilt part of Windsor Castle.
He then took holy orders, and was made
curate of Pulham, in Norfolk. Step by step
Wykeham rose to the highest dignities: being
first, secretary to the king, lastly, Chancellor of
England and Bishop of Winchester. Compelled
to resign office by a cabal to prevent all priests
holding civil employments, the bishop applied
himself to building and endowing New College,
Oxford, and a college at Winchester, originally
the enlargement of a small grammar school,
to which the founder himself had been sent
as a child by his kind patron, Sir Nicolas Uvedale.
When Edward the Third retired to
Eltham to mourn over the loss of the Black
Prince, the Duke of Lancaster (John of Gaunt),
the real sovereign for the time, persecuted
Wykeham, drove him from parliament, and
seized all his temporalities. Richard the
Second, however, rehabilitated him. The
minister resigned when he found the young
king recklessly rushing to ruin, henceforward
devoted himself to good works, and died in
1404. Winchester owes much to this great
prelate, for he procured the charter for the
city as a wool staple, and he restored that
admirable charity, the Hospital of St. Cross, just
outside the town, originally founded by Bishop
de Blois, in 1136, for thirteen poor men.
Shakespeare's Cardinal Beaufort increased it
and added the distinct establishment of "The
Almshouse of Noble Poverty," for thirty-five
brethren and three attendant nuns. This
great cardinal lies in the cathedral in a chantry
of his own, opposite Bishop Waynflete. It
was mutilated by the Puritan soldiers when
they stabled their horses in Winchester choir.
In spite of the Bard and Sir Joshua, Beaufort
never murdered his rival Gloucester, nor did he
die in a torture of remorse, but, on the contrary,
as an eye-witness tells us, he made a goodly
ending of it. "Unscrupulous in the choice of
his instruments" the cardinal may have been,
but he was undoubtedly a great statesman,
firm, far-seeing, and fertile in resources.

A plain marble slab in Prior Silkstede's
Chapel marks the tomb of an illustrious
angler, honest Fleet-street tradesman, and
excellent writer, Isaac Walton, who died in
1683, at the house of his son-in-law, Dr. Hawkins,
a prebendary of Winchester. His epitaph,
probably written by Bishop Ken (the author
of the Evening Hymn), his brother-in-law, is
well worthy the excellent man it records:

    Alas! he's gone before—
    Gone to return no more.
    Our panting breasts aspire
    After their aged sire,
    Whose well-spent life did last
    Full ninety years and past;
    But now he hath begun
    That which will ne'er be done;
    Crown'd with eternal bliss,
    We wish our souls with his.

Every stone of this old cathedral, has its
legend. At the altar Edward the Confessor
was crowned, and in the nave his mother,
Emma, falsely accused of incontinence, passed
safely, blindfold, over the ordeal of nine red-
hot ploughshares. In this building lies a son
of King Alfred; here, at the high altar, Canute,
after his rebuke on the Southampton shore to
his courtiers, hung up his golden crown, and
here he was afterwards interred.

Rufus, the successor of the Conqueror,
delighted in Winchester because it was so near the
Hampshire forests. Indeed the rapacious rascal
had reason to like it, since on the death of his
father he had scooped out of the Winchester
treasury sixty thousand pounds of silver
besides gold and precious stones. Rufus died
detested by his subjects, and the monks he had
plundered, but he left two things to be
remembered—the White Tower that he completed,
and the Great Hall at Westminster, that
he put together. The plain tomb of the tyrant,
whom no one lamented, is still existing—a
stumbling-block nearly in the centre of the
choir at Winchester Cathedral.

Winchester has twice been glorified by the
splendour of royal marriages—a happy and an
unhappy alliance. The first was in February,
1403, when Henry the Fourth married Joanna
of Navarre. This sensible and amiable woman
was the daughter of Charles the Bad and the
widow of John the valiant Duke of Bretagne;