ies. The Minstrel's Gallery in Exeter Cathedral may profitably
be compared with it. This accuracy of execution in an essential detail
shows the patient copying from life which accompanied--and indeed was
necessary to--the vivid imagination that could create so many
non-existent monsters. For among all these grotesque chimeras and
fantastic mixtures of the animal and human element you will notice the
creative faculty in its strongest development. These strange beasts,
half man and half a goat, part woman and part fish, have each of them
a reality of individual life, a possibility of visualised
construction, that is marvellous in its appeal to the spectator.
Another violin player appears upon this same door, this time with a
human head set on the body of a beast, and beside it some small
animal dances to the tune.

The mediaeval carver was no mystic symbolist. But he felt so much and
so vividly that when two strongly opposed ideas came into his head at
once he had to express himself by throwing them together into one
newly-forged creation of a woman-ape, or a dog-man. He had besides his
own thoughts all that strange gallery to draw from, of sirens,
harpies, centaurs, which a dying mythology bequeathed. You may trace
most of the Metamorphoses of Ovid on the walls of the cathedrals. Then
there were the queer bestiaries of his own doctors, the early
Mandevilles, the Presterjohns of the twelfth century, the Munchausens
of all time. From these he inherited the Sciopod upon the door of
Sens, the cynoscephalae, and "men whose heads do grow beneath their
shoulders." He lived, too, in an age far more pictorial, far more
given to the living allegory, than any centuries to which the cold
print of a book alone appealed. Architecture, as he knew it, ceased
when printing became cheap. But in his days the Bible of the people,
the encyclopaedia of the poor, the general guide to heavenly or
terrestrial knowledge of the mass of worshippers, was what they saw in
the Mystery Plays, or what was carved for them (often inspired from
the same dramatic source) upon the walls of their cathedrals. When he
had tried all these, there remained the thousand simple incidents of
daily life, such as the mother welcoming her child which is on this
Portail des Libraires and was copied from it (as is the case in six
other instances) in the misericordes of the choir in 1467, or the man
who steals clothes from the line as Falstaff's ragged regiment did (a
ruf