THE ABBEY CHURCH OF DORCHESTER. 159 grccatcr or less analogy to the subject of our inquiry than all my previous inquiries in other parts of England. It is to these peculiarities to which I would now more especially draw the attention of the Institute. Dorchester Church was a few years back made the subject of an elegant volume published by the Architectural Society of this University. In that work two branches of the subject have been completely exhausted ; every document and historical reference bearing upon the vicissitudes of the cit} and abbey has been carefully brought together ; and the architectural details of the building have been described and engraved with the greatest minuteness, and, in almost every case, with the greatest accuracy. What is left for me on the present occasion is happily just what is most agreeable to my own taste, a general survey of the church regarded as a whole, and of its several parts as specimens of successive styles of architecture ; to which I may add an attempt to trace out the successive steps by which the building assumed its present form, from its foundation in the twelfth century to the great work of restoration commenced in the nineteenth. The history of Dorchester, its extensive Roman antiquities, its important place in the early ecclesiastical history of England, form no jDart of my present subject. Obscure as the place may now seem, there was a time when it was the seat of one of our greatest bishoprics, the fellow of Canterbury and York and Winchester. But those times had passed away before the present fabric, or even the foundation to which it belonged, had any existence. The present church can hardly be considered as in any sense the representative of that ancient Cathedral which was the mother church of a diocese extending, it is said, for a brief space over the whole of Mercia and Wessex. No portion of the present building is older than the translation of the see to Lincoln in the time of Lanfranc, or even than the re-establishment of the church in 1140 by Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, as a Monastery of Black Canons. § 1. — General Characteristics of the Building. Outline and Thc most Striking point about the church is that, Ground Plan, notwlthstauding its great size, and ecclesiastical rank, it has in no respect the architectural character of a
