gan with the Cathedral, a building imposing enough
to rank among the most impressive of its class anywhere, but whose
peculiar _setting_ in this remote northern country, joined to the
associations of its early history with the Scandinavian Rollos, Sigurds,
Einars, and Hacos of our dingier chronicles, serve greatly to enhance
its interest. It is a noble pile, built of a dark-tinted Old Red
Sandstone,--a stone which, though by much too sombre for adequately
developing the elegancies of the Grecian or Roman architecture, to which
a light delicate tone of color seems indispensable, harmonizes well with
the massier and less florid styles of the Gothic. The round arch of that
ancient Norman school which was at one time so generally recognized as
Saxon, prevails in the edifice, and marks out its older portions. A few
of the arches present on their ringstones those characteristic toothed
and zig-zag ornaments that are of not unfamiliar occurrence on the round
squat doorways of the older parish churches of England; but by much the
greater number exhibit merely a few rude mouldings, that bend over
ponderous columns and massive capitals, unfretted by the tool of the
carver. Though of colossal magnificence, the exterior of the edifice
yields in effect, as in all true Gothic buildings,--for the Gothic is
greatest in what the Grecian is least,--to the sombre sublimity of the
interior. The nave, flanked by the dim deep aisles, and by a double row
of smooth-stemmed gigantic columns, supporting each a double tier of
ponderous arches, and the transepts, with their three tiers of small
Norman windows, and their bold semi-circular arcs, demurely gay with
toothed or angular carvings, that speak of the days of Rolf and
Torfeinar, are singularly fine,--far superior to aught else of the kind
in Scotland; and a happy accident has added greatly to their effect. A
rare Byssus,--the _Byssus aeruginosa_ of Linnaeus,--the _Leprasia
aeruginosa_ of modern botanists,--one of those gloomy vegetables of the
damp cave and dark mine whose true habitat is rather under than upon the
earth, has crept over arch, and column, and broad bare wall, and given
to well nigh the entire interior of the building a close-fitted lining
of dark velvety green, which, like the Attic rust of an ancient medal,
forms an appropriate covering to the sculpturings which it enwraps
without concealing, and harmonizes with at once the dim light and the
antique architecture. Where the su