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NOTES AND QUERIES. m s. vm. OCT. 4,
opposite to the Gate ; the Fountain is not
at the intersection of the diagonals ; no
side is of the same length as the side oppo-
site to it ; and on the north side the Library
range is not in a line with the Chapel. Yet
the whole has a singularly picturesque and
harmonious aspect.
Standing by Mercury, in the centre of the great quadrangle of Christ Church, you see on your west the long range of buildings bisected by Tom Tower. This perhaps the most successful instance of Wren's Gothic is noble in outline and proportion.
" But the coarseness of its detail [says Mr. Reginald Blomfield] is out of scale with the delicate sixteenth-century work below, and here, as elsewhere, Wren seems to have paid the very scantiest attention to the nature of the older work with which he had to deal."
On the outer side, in the centre of the great fagade of 382ft., the " fayre gate," with its richly panelled front and flanking turrets, was left by Wolsey unfinished. These turrets, with a corresponding pair on the inner side of the quadrangle, would, I suppose, had the Cardinal lived to complete his' design, have risen high above a great square gateway tower. The western front of Thornbury Castle, Gloucestershire, bears a striking resemblance, on a smaller scale, to the western front of Christ Church. It was built by the Duke of Buckingham, in rivalry, it is said, of Wolsey. But Wolsey 's gate remained unfinished, with its turrets tem- porarily roofed-in and the centre part open to the weather, as shown by Loggan, until June, 1681, when Wren took it in hand. By November, 1682, he had fan -vaulted it in stone, and erected a large cupola over, and a smaller one on each side of, the arch- way. But in one important particular Wren seriously injured the original design. As Loggan shows, Wolsey began to make an oriel overhanging the gate, whereas Wren wantonly substituted a window, deeply recessed in many orders a change which has thrust the side turrets into undue promi- nence, and less?ned the importance of the natural entrance into the quadrangle. On the south side of Tom Quad runs the magni- ficent range containing Wolsey's Dining Hall and the new Bell Tower. The Hall, the largest of College dining -halls, is 115ft. long by 40ft. wide and 50ft. high. The picturesque louvre was destroyed in the fire of 1720, and never replaced. West- minster Hall is 290 ft. long by 68 ft. wide and 92 ft. high ; St. George's Hall, Windsor Castle, 200 ft. long by 34 ft. wide ; and the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace,
built by Henry VIII. after Wolsey's death,
and completed in 1536, 106 ft. long by 40 ft.
wide and 60ft. high. The Bell Tower a
great square tower with angle turrets,
which rises to the east above the hall-
staircase is really only a stone case built
by Mr. Bodley to hide the wooden structure
which actually contains the bells. The
tower, as it now stands, is incomplete, the
architect having intended a lofty and intri-
cate wooden superstructure of great beauty
to rest upon it. A former bell tower seems
to have stood on the same spot before the
space was cleared for the erection of
Dean Fell's staircase. Wolsey, who had
finished his great Hall by 1529 on the upper
story, after the fashion of New College and
Magdalen, had built this earlier bell tower
in the south-east corner of his Great Quad-
rant. It is clearly shown by Agas and
Bereblock, but by Loggan's time it had
ceased to exist. Behind the east side of
the quadrangle, but south of an imaginary
line drawn through Tom Gateway and
Mercury to the centre of the eastern range,
stands the ancient tower and spire of the
Cathedral, rising to the height of 144 ft.
The north side is a monotonous elevation of
two stories, only broken at the extreme
north-east corner by Kill-Canon archway,
which leads into Peckwater.
Why, then, is it that, although the sky- line is so nobly broken by Tom Tower, the great mass of the Hall, the Bell Tower, and the venerable tower and spire of the Cathe- dral, yet the general view of Tom Quad is not altogether satisfactory ?
I think it is because the uniform monotony of the long northern range, where should have arisen Wolsey's splendid Chapel, and the nineteenth-century restoration of the skeleton cloister right round the quad- rangle, have emphasized unduly the rigid horizontal lines of the buildings at the expense of the vertical. Of this cloister, which was to have encircled the inside of the quadrangle, nothing was originally built except the springers and four-centred wall-ribs. These, being unfinished and of rugged appearance, were re-edified and made uniform about 1640, and afterwards, together with the footing of the buttresses, restored by Scott between 1870 and 1880, apparently a different arrangement from the original design. Then, too, the east and west ranges appear to have been origin- ally some 40 ft. shorter measured inside the quadrangle than they became in 1668. The centre of Tom Quad also lacks a satis- factory finish such as the beautiful fountain
