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Many old vicars are buried within this cloister. The roof is of oak, the wall-plates, purlins, and rafters are richly moulded and the tie-beams and principals are richly carved on both sides with various patterns and devices. The Rev. F. Havergal says:—"The late William Cooke acquired an immense amount of information relating to the college and the vicars in olden time.
Several pikes are then stuck into the opposite side to keep the bent from being swayed over, until the tenons on the foot of the post is entered into the mortice on the sill: it is then secured by stays, until the next bent is raised, when the girts connect them together. In this manner all the bents are raised: the wall-plates are then lifted upon the building which connect all the bents.
At the top of these you will set your wall- plates; to the wall-plates you will nail your slabs; on the inside of the slabs you will nail light rods of wood, and plaster them over with mud, having first, however, put up the roof and thatched it. Three or four men will have split the stuff and put up the hut in a fortnight. We will suppose it to be about 18 feet by 12.
It was erected by Pomaree II., who, on this occasion, showed all the zeal of a royal proselyte. The building was over seven hundred feet in length, and of a proportionate width; the vast ridge-pole was at intervals supported by a row of thirty-six cylindrical trunks of the bread-fruit tree; and, all round, the wall-plates rested on shafts of the palm.
Certainly, however, the most interesting of the whole is the library of the Rev. Dr Magoon, "an eminent and popular divine of the Baptist Church." He entered on active life as an operative bricklayer. There are, it appears, wall-plates extant, and not a few, built by his hands, and it was only by saving the earnings these brought to him that he could obtain an education.
"For having made a great cage of wood of solid beams, timbers and wall-plates, measuring nine feet in length by eight in breadth, and of the height of seven feet between the partitions, smoothed and clamped with great bolts of iron, which has been placed in a chamber situated in one of the towers of the Bastille Saint-Antoine, in which cage is placed and detained, by command of the king our lord, a prisoner who formerly inhabited an old, decrepit, and ruined cage.
The Englishmen set up their forge and anvil; and we commenced unloading corrugated iron sheets to form our magazines. Fortunately, I had a number of wall-plates, rafters, &c., that I had brought from Egypt for this purpose, as there is no straight wood in the country.
It almost appears as if this style, which has its own peculiar beauties, had been adopted out of a national antagonism to the contemporary style in England. The Tudor architecture has always a horizontal tendency, spreading itself out in broad open screens or wall-plates, diversified by occasional angular eminences as, for instance, in the tops of the decorated windows.
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