Wherefore let us entreat our antient water-nurses
To show their power, to grant us t' help to drain their
   purses;
And send us good old Captain Flood to lead us out to
   battle,
The two-penny pack, with Scales on's back will drive
   out all the cattle.

This noble captain yet was never known to fail us,
But did the conquest get of all that did assail us;
His furious rage none could assuage, but to the
   world's great wonder,
He tears down banks, and breaks their cranks and
   whirligigs asunder.

Still the Dutchmen plied their spades, and
Charles the First urged forward the work,
which was however stopped by the agitation
aroused by Oliver Cromwell, "Lord of
the Fens," as he was called, who urged
the gross exactions of the royal commission
and the inevitable plunder that would fall
on the helpless smaller proprietors at
the great man's voice. The work stopped,
and the Earl of Bedford died poor. In
1649, the new earl and Vermuyden again
set to work, afterwards aided by Cromwell's
Scotch and Blake's Dutch prisoners,
and by 1653 forty thousand acres of land
were reclaimed. There are now in Lincolnshire
and the Great Bedford Level, sixty-one
thousand acres of reclaimed land, worth
on an average four pounds an acre. Ely is
now healthier than Pau, sheep feed where
fish once floated, the fen men are no longer
savages, more irreclaimable than their
fever-haunted marshes. The fate of poor
Vermuyden was sad indeed. During
the civil wars he had sold all his lands
in Dagenham, Hatfield, Sedgemoor,
Malvern, and the Bedford Level, to pay his
Dutch workmen. The ungrateful company
then preferred heavy pecuniary claims
against him. He could not meet them,
and in 1656 appeared before parliament,
four years after the completion of his great
work, as a suppliant for redress. It is
supposed that he soon after went abroad and
died, a poor, heart-broken old man. Yet
Vermuyden did a brave work and he left
large-brained descendants. Through the
Babingtons (the mother's side) the late
Mr. Macaulay was descended from this
patient, far-seeing Dutchman.

From High Burnam, in the isle of Axholm,
the furthest object is the bright heaven-pointing
spire of Laughton-en-le-Morthen,
that Norman hill village which
the Sheffield people, who see the spire shine
in the daybreak, call prettily "Lighten in
the Morning;" but from the Rood Tower
of Lincoln the crow sees not only Hatfield
Chase, which Vermuyden won from the
water, but the blue Yorkshire wolds on
the other side of the Humber, and the hills
about Aldborough and Burton; indeed,
much of Yorkshire and all that amphibious
country, which old Fuller quaintly compares
in shape "to a bended bow, of which
the sea makes the back, the rivers Welland
and Humber the two horns, and the river
Trent the string."

Lincoln Cathedral, once the throne of a
vast see, that embraced Ely, Oxford, and
Peterborough, is in itself a history of
Gothic art, from early Saxon to late pointed.
Begun by Bishop Remigius, to resemble
Rouen, in 1075, it was partly rebuilt by
Bishop Alexander, after a fire in 1123-47.
St. Hugh built the east transept, chapels,
choir, chapter-house, and east front of
the western transept; Hugh of Wells, in
1206-35, completed the nave, the late
geometrical decorated cloisters, and the rood
screen, begun in the reign of Edward the
First. It was just after this Hugh of
Wells had put by his hods and trowels (in
1237), that as one of the canons was
preaching on the unseemly feuds then
raging between the chapter of Lincoln and
the bishop, having taken the very
appropriate text, "Were we silent the very
stones would cry out," the central tower,
perhaps too hastily built by Remigius, fell
with the crash of an earthquake, shaking
the very foundation of the building. Many
thought the end of the world had come,
but the strong-nerved canon, quite
unmoved, continued to thunder forth his
sermon against the enemies of the
peacemakers. This tower Bishop Grosteste
(1237-54) rebuilt, and also the east tower.
D'Alverly added the wooden spire, Lexington
and Oliver Sutton the beautiful angel
choir, Alnwick the great west window,
Wren the pagan Doric cloister, and the
James the First clergy the big bell of the
central tower.

Grosteste, the prelate who partly rebuilt
the central tower, was almost as great a
man as Roger Bacon, of whom he was a
contemporary. He seems to have been
at once a reformer, a logician, a theologian,
a linguist, a poet, and a philosopher.
One of the first English scholars
to study Aristotle in the original Greek,
he was also one of the pioneers in
Hebrew learning. He did not reach such
a pitch of learning as Roger Bacon, who
seems to have had more than foreshadowings
both of steam and gunpowder, but he
believed in the possibility of transmuting
metals, as Bacon did, and he, no doubt,
laboured hard, as Bacon laboured, at the