Two years after this translation of St. Audrey, the Abbey Church was made the Cathedral of the new diocese of Ely, carved out of the vast See of Lincoln. Of the work wrought by Abbot Simeon and his successor, Richard, the great north and south transepts alone remain. The choir they built was replaced in the thirteenth century by that lovely Early English work we now see; the nave they had not reached. This is a work of some sixty years later than their time, and is one of the finest examples of late Norman architecture in the country. The Norman style went out with a blaze of architectural splendour at Ely, where the great west front shows it blending almost imperceptibly into Early English. It is a singular architectural composition, this western entrance and forefront of Ely Cathedral; the piling up to a dizzy height of a great tower, intended to be flanked on either side by two western transepts each ending in a smaller tower. The north-western transept fell in ruins at some unknown period and has never been rebuilt, so that a view of this front presents a curiously unbalanced look, very distressing to all those good folk whose sensibilities would be harrowed if in their domestic establishment they lacked a _pendant_ to everything. To the housewife to whom a fender where the poker is not duly and canonically neighboured by the tongs looks a debauched and sinful object; to the citizen who would grieve if the bronze or cut-glass lustre on one side of his mantel-shelf were not matched on the other, this is a sight of the most dolorous sort. It must have been to soothe the feelings of all such that a sum of £25,000 was appealed for when Sir Gilbert Scott was restoring the Cathedral, many years ago, and its rebuilding was proposed. The money was not forthcoming, the work was not done, and so Scott did not obtain the £2500 commission. Scott's loss is our gain, for we are spared one more example of his way with old cathedrals.
[Illustration: THE WEST FRONT, ELY CATHEDRAL.]
The ruins of the missing transept are plain to see, and a huge and ugly buttress props up the tower from this side; but, were that building restored, we should only have again, in its completeness, a curiously childish design. For that is the note of this west front and of this great tower, rising in stage upon stage of masonry until the great blocks of stone, dwarfed by distance, look like so many courses of grey brick. So does a child build up towers and castles of wooden blocks.