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The shrine of the Confessor at Westminster, the mosaic pavement beside the altar of the abbey, the paintings on the walls of its chapterhouse remind us of the schools which were springing up under Giotto and the Pisans. But the wealth which this art progress shows drew trade to English shores. England was as yet simply an agricultural country.
There is a pretty group of three angels singing in the sky; the landscape is as minute in detail as those his old fellow-pupil Piero used to paint in Cosimo's studio. He did not show enough talent to become a painter, and took priests' orders later. The painting is extant in the chapterhouse, and is a very fair and unrestored specimen of his best style.
The east window has lost most of its tracery, and has the appearance of a great archway; its date, together with the whole of the chancel, is late Decorated, but the exquisite little chapterhouse is later still, and may be better described as early Perpendicular. It is octagonal in plan, and has in each side a window with an ogee arch above. The stones employed are remarkably large.
We have been round three sides of the cloister: on the north the church; on the east the chapterhouse and dormitory; on the south the refectory. There remain the buildings abutting on the west wall. In the arrangement of these no strict rule was observed.
He was clad in black, and looked like a feathered ecclesiastic; but I know not whether it were Bishop Dennison's ghost or that of some old monk. On one side of the cloisters, and contiguous to the main body of the cathedral, stands the chapterhouse.
In the north transept are remains of the dormitory stairs, and on this side the cloisters, too, were situated. The aumbry, parlor, sacristy, chapterhouse, slype to the infirmary, day-stairs to dormitory and undercroft were on the east side of the cloisters; the postern and river gate, over which was the abbot's lodge on the north side, and also the buttery, refectory, and kitchen.
Dominic kneeling; and the same treatment recurs on a wall near the dormitory; in the chapterhouse is a third Crucifixion, with the Virgin swooning, a composition of twenty life-sized figures the red background, which has a strange and harsh effect, is the misdoing of some restorer; an "Annunciation," the figures of about three-fourths of life-size, in a dormitory; in the adjoining passage, the "Virgin enthroned," with four saints; on the wall of a cell, the "Coronation of the Virgin," with Saints Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Benedict, Dominic, Francis and Peter Martyr; two Dominicans welcoming Jesus, habited as a pilgrim; an "Adoration of the Magi"; the "Marys at the Sepulchre."
The reverend Hugh C. Love walked from the old chapterhouse of saint Mary's abbey past James and Charles Kennedy's, rectifiers, attended by Geraldines tall and personable, towards the Tholsel beyond the ford of hurdles. Ben Dollard with a heavy list towards the shopfronts led them forward, his joyful fingers in the air. Come along with me to the subsheriff's office, he said.
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