ective bas-reliefs of jesting
subject:--two cocks carrying on their shoulders a long staff to which a
fox (?) is tied by the legs, hanging down between them: the strut of the
foremost cock, lifting one leg at right angles to the other, is
delicious. Then a stag hunt, with a centaur horseman drawing a bow; the
arrow has gone clear through the stag's throat, and is sticking there.
Several capital hunts with dogs, with fruit trees between, and birds in
them; the leaves, considering the early time, singularly well set, with
the edges outwards, sharp, and deep cut: snails and frogs filling up the
intervals, as if suspended in the air, with some saucy puppies on their
hind legs, two or three nondescript beasts; and, finally, on the centre
of one of the arches on the south side, an elephant and castle,--a very
strange elephant, yet cut as if the carver had seen one."

Observe this elephant and castle; we shall meet with him farther north.

"These sculptures of St. Zeno are, however, quite quiet and tame
compared with those of St. Michele of Pavia, which are designed also in
a somewhat gloomier mood; significative, as I think, of indigestion.
(Note that they are much earlier than St. Zeno; of the seventh century
at latest. There is more of nightmare, and less of wit in them.) Lord
Lindsay has described them admirably, but has not said half enough; the
state of mind represented by the west front is more that of a feverish
dream, than resultant from any determined architectural purpose, or even
from any definite love and delight in the grotesque. One capital is
covered with a mass of grinning heads, other heads grow out of two
bodies, or out of and under feet; the creatures are all fighting, or
devouring, or struggling which shall be uppermost, and yet in an
ineffectual way, as if they would fight for ever, and come to no
decision. Neither sphinxes nor centaurs did I notice, nor a single
peacock (I believe peacocks to be purely Byzantine), but mermaids with
_two_ tails (the sculptor having perhaps seen double at the time),
strange, large fish, apes, stags (bulls?), dogs, wolves, and horses,
griffins, eagles, long-tailed birds (cocks?), hawks, and dragons,
without end, or with a dozen of ends, as the case may be; smaller birds,
with rabbits, and small nondescripts, filling the friezes. The actual
leaf, which is used in the best Byzantine mouldings at Venice, occurs in
parts of these Pavian designs. But the Lombard animals are all