Manchester was created the warden and fellows became dean
and canons and the parish church became the cathedral. The
first bishop was James Prince Lee, who died in 1869; the second
was James Fraser, who died in 1885; the third was James
Moorhouse, who resigned in 1903 and was succeeded by Edmund
Arbuthnott Knox. The church endowments are considerable
and have been the subject of a special act of parliament, known
as the Manchester Rectory Division Act of 1845, which provides
£1500 per annum for the dean and £600 to each of the four
canons, and divides the residue among the incumbents of the
new churches formed out of the old parish.
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Of the Roman Catholic churches that of the Holy Name, which belongs to the Jesuits, is remarkable for its costly decoration. The Greek Church and most of the Nonconformist bodies have places of worship. There are twelve Jewish synagogues. The meeting-house of the Society of Friends is said to be the largest of the kind in the kingdom and will seat 1200 persons.
Public Buildings.—The Royal Infirmary, founded in 1752, having become inadequate for its purposes, a new building has been erected on the south side of the city near the university, from designs by Edwin T. Hall and John Brooke; it was opened in 1909 by king Edward VII. The central site in Piccadilly thus became available for other purposes, and the corporation gave instructions for plans to be made for a new library and art gallery. The art gallery already existing in 1909 was founded as the Royal Institution, but in 1882 passed under the control of the city council. The building was designed by Sir Charles Barry. The collection contains some fine paintings by Etty, Millais, Leighton and other artists. The sculpture includes casts of the Elgin marbles and a statue of Dr John Dalton by Chantrey. The most striking of the public buildings is the town hall, probably the largest municipal building in the country, but no longer entirely adequate to the increasing business of the city council. It was completed in 1877 from designs by Alfred Waterhouse, who selected as the style of architecture a form of Gothic, but treated it very freely as purposes of utility required. The edifice covers 8000 sq. yds., and includes more than two hundred and fifty rooms. The building consists of continuous lines of corridors surrounding a central courtyard and connected by bridges. The principal tower is 286 ft. high to the top of the ball, and affords a view which extends over a large part of south Lancashire and Cheshire and is bounded only by the hills of Derbyshire. The tower contains a remarkable peal of bells by Taylor of Loughborough, forming an almost perfect chromatic scale of twenty-one bells; each bell has on it a line from canto 105 of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. The great hall is 100 ft. long and 50 ft. wide, and contains a magnificent organ built by Cavaillé-Coll of Paris. The twelve panels of this room are filled with paintings
