106 Illustrations of Lancashire
it sufliced no longer, and then awas built the noble and beautiful "old church," the "cathedral" of today, the body of which is thus now nearly 470 years old.1
Up till 1656 the windows of this fine church, in conformity with the first principles of all high-class Plantagenet and Tudor ecclesiastical architecture, were coloured and pictorial; the design being that they should represent to the congregation assembled inside some grand or touching Scripture incident, making palpable to the eye what the ear might be slow to apprehend. In the year mentioned they were broken to pieces by the Republicans, one of the reasons, perhaps, why the statue of Cromwell - the gloomy figure in the street close by - has been so placed as for the ill-used building to be behind it. While the church was in its full beauty the town was visited by Leland, who on his way through Cheshire passed Rostherne Mere, evidently, from his language, as lovely then as it is to-day:
"States fall, arts fade, but Nature doth not die!"
"Manchestre," he tells us, was at that period (temp. Henry VIII.) "the fairest, best-builded, quikkest, and most populous Tounne of Lan-
1 The original tower remained till 1864, when, being considered insecure, it was taken down, and the existing facsimile erected in its place.
