Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/710

ÆT. 60] could do so without visibly banding and tying them, but this he funks. This was my chief point; as I refused to be led into a discussion as to whether they could be tied up to look neat, but stuck to it that even if they had to be covered with a cage of bars it should be done rather than removing them"—and replacing them, it is to be understood, by copies professing to be originals.

The twelve statues grouped round the base of that magnificent spire, still in spite of all restorations and reconstructions the "eye of Oxford," the central crown of all her architecture, were among the noblest surviving examples of English sculpture of the early fourteenth century. Time and neglect had seriously impaired several of them; and in the first restoration of the spire, carried out by the architect Buckler according to the ideas of that "second period of Gothic knowledge" which Morris held in such profound contempt, just at the time when Morris himself went up to Exeter as an undergraduate, two had been wholly removed and replaced, and some of the others had been largely repaired. When the second restoration was decided upon and placed in the hands of Mr. T.G. Jackson, the ten ancient statues were the only important features of the spire which had not been already tampered with, and their importance was thus doubled. Mr. Jackson's first report was that they were all so much perished that it was not safe to allow even their ruins to remain. Owing to the decay of the holdfasts certain heads and hands were so loose that they could be lifted off. But the surface of the stone had weathered to such hardness that it resisted the point of a knife; and the bodies, which were solid set into the wall behind them, had actually to be sawn from their settings before they could be taken down.