The achievements of Wyatt are recounted by Britton, who does not appear to have entirely decided whether he approved or not. Some of them, no doubt, were necessary; and it would be unfair to indiscriminately blame any architect who had to deal, however violently, with a building which had deteriorated, not merely in the pass of time, but also by the shock of war. Also a great deal of what Wyatt did was done for the sake of warmth, though the object in view, it is said, was not attained. Britton says that not only was there a general restoration of doors, windows, and flooring throughout, but also "two of the spires were partly rebuilt, the ends of the transepts were strengthened by new buttresses, the external roofs of the aisles were raised, and five divisions of the stone roof in the nave were taken down and replaced with plaster. The Lady Chapel was united with the choir by removing the screen which had been erected by Bishop Hacket. On taking this away, the workmen discovered the beautiful old screen which formed in all probability the original partition when the Lady Chapel was completed by the executors of Walter de Langton. This elaborate piece of architecture was in a very mutilated state; but Mr Wyatt, having restored it by the assistance of Roman cement to a very perfect condition, appropriated part of it to the new altar-piece, and the remainder to the organ screen or partition which divides the nave from the Choir," and which took up the whole of the western bay of the choir.
Since Britton's time it has been thought necessary to take another tone and to try to justify these alterations. Mr James Potter, the son of Mr Wyatt's chief assistant, who was afterwards architect to the cathedral, has endeavoured to prove that some of the alterations were unavoidable, and that the others were not made under Wyatt's advice, but in spite of it. Incidentally, in the course of a letter to the _Staffordshire Advertiser_, he speaks of the "unsightly and incongruous work of Wren's," in referring to the wooden reredos, and states that Wren had previously closed the arches of the four most western bays of the choir in order to receive the stalls. He also says: "But so completely did Wren perform his work of blocking-up that he took care to conceal every vestige of moulding, both of the piers and the archivolts, leaving only in view the clustered shafts from which the vaulting of the roof sprang. I have before noticed that Mr James Wyatt's death occurred in A.D. 1813, and that this western portion of the choir remained in the state in which Sir Christopher Wren left it up to the following year. In the early part of that year the architect to the fabric, the late Mr Potter, was instructed by the dean and chapter to cause the entire removal of the old stall work and unmask the three arches (then concealed), this being the space on either side of the choir occupied by the stalls in question. The arches being much dilapidated and past restoration, Dean Woodhouse decided to have them made to correspond with the decorated bays in an easterly direction. This work was executed, as also the canopy of the new stalls, in Roman cement. I cannot myself think that Dean Woodhouse exhibited any degree of bad taste in adopting the existing decorated arches as his model for the new ones; and, as regards the canopies of the new stalls, they were exact resemblances of the old reredos, and surely no modern architect will presume to find fault with them. I must here observe that the choice of material was not confined to the architect employed to carry out the work, but was chosen by the dean and chapter, the state of the fabric fund, out of which the whole of the expenses were defrayed, being insufficient to meet the outlay of a more costly material."
