LINCOLNSHIRE SPIRES come to a slender point; but we are told that when it was struck by lightning in 1797 a mill-stone was set on the apex into which the weathercock was mortised. There are ten bells, a larger ring than is possessed by any church in the county but one, viz., Ewerby near Sleaford.
The date 1280 is assigned to the tower and north aisle because the windows of that aisle reproduce in the cusped circles of their head-lights the patterns of windows which had just a few years before been inserted in Salisbury chapter-house, and the west window of the aisle is a reduction to six lights of the great eight-light east window at Lincoln; but neither Lincoln great tower nor Salisbury spire had yet been built, and as they are the only buildings which are admitted to surpass Grantham steeple—the former in richness of detail, the latter in its soaring spire—and as Boston was not built till a hundred years later, nor Louth till 200 years after Boston, it is clear that in 1300 Grantham for height and beauty stood without a rival. Now-a-days, of course, we have both Boston and Louth, and have them in the same county, and though Sir Gilbert Scott puts Grantham as second only to Salisbury among English steeples, and though in the grandeur and interest of its interior as well as in the profuse ornamentation of its exterior Louth cannot compete with it at all, yet there is in the delicate tapering lines of Louth spire and the beautiful way in which it rises from its lofty tower-pinnacles connected with their four pairs of light flying buttresses a satisfying grace and a beauty of proportion which no other church seems to possess; and when we look closely at the somewhat aimless bands of diaper work and arcading in the second stage of Grantham tower and then turn to the harmonious simplicity of the three stages in the Louth tower and the incomparable beauty of the belfry lights with their crocketed hood-mouldings which are carried up in lines ascending like a canopy to the pinnacled parapet, it seems to satisfy the eye and the desire for beauty and symmetry in the fullest possible measure.
The church has not a great number of monuments; that to Richard de Salteby, 1362, is the earliest, and there is, besides the Malham tomb, one of the Harrington family, and a huge erection to Chief Justice Ryder, whose descendants derive their title of Harrowby from a hamlet close by. There are two libraries in the church, one with no less than seventy-four chained books. But a church forms a bad library, and many
