248 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
pews occupied by the corporation, or confined their measures to the 
same plain state and condition the sittings are, as occupied by other 
persons moving in as equally a respectable sphere of life.” 
I have quoted this as an example of a nineteenth century entry, 
I do not think anything more amusing was ever penned by 
medizeval scribe. 
The result of Mr. Foulston’s so-called restoration is well known. 
The church was cleared out from end to end. In April, 1826, the 
materials, comprising the seats, galleries, together with the screens, 
and no one knows what other valuable remains of the Church’s 
former grandeur, were sold by auction, and realized the sum of 
£134 15s., as appears by the churchwardens’ accounts. Mr. Foul- 
ston had no feeling for Gothic architecture, or reverence for the 
traditions of the past. He was the Wyatt of St. Andrew’s, and 
he spared nothing. I think we may take it for granted that the 
Church had received little or no permanent injury before the resto- 
ration committee and Mr. Foulston took it it hand. But what did 
the architect do? We know something of what he did. His 
sole object apparently was to eliminate every trace, so far as he 
could accomplish it, of interest and antiquity in the Church. He 
blocked up the doorway from the south chapel, he blocked up the 
priest’s doorway, he blocked up the rood-loft stairs, he blocked up 
the tower arch. He pulled down the parvise chamber over the 
south porch, he destroyed the screen, he mutilated and buried the 
sepulchral effigies, he made the crypt a charnel-house, disfigured the 
chapels, and contrived galleries of sham Gothic—sham in style, 
sham in material. By the high pews and narrow gangways, and 
the abolition of the central passage, with the enclosure of the 
tower and the westernmost bay of the nave and aisles, he dwarfed 
the building and destroyed its proportions. He found the church 
choked up and encumbered, it is true, but not mutilated ; he left it 
neat and tidy, but a wreck and a shadow of its former noble 
self. 
Plymouth owes a debt to the present Vicar of St. Andrew’s, 
which it will not easily pay, for his persevering and successful 
endeavours to undo the work of Foulston, and to make his church 
more worthy of the town, of its antecedents, and of that branch 
of the Church Catholic to which it belongs. But there is still 
much to do, 
St. Andrew’s is to us cathedral and parish church. Before 
