n streamed upon it, high over head,
through the narrow windows above, it reminded me of a pall of rich green
velvet. It seems subject, on some of the lower mouldings and damper
recesses, especially amid the tombs and in the aisles, to a decomposing
mildew, which eats into it in fantastic map-like lines of mingled black
and gray, so resembling Runic fret-work, that I had some difficulty in
convincing myself that the tracery which it forms,--singularly
appropriate to the architecture,--was not the effect of design. The
choir and chancel of the edifice, which at the time of my visit were
still employed as the parish church of Kirkwall, and had become a "world
too wide" for the shrunken congregation, are more modern and ornate than
the nave and transepts; and the round arch gives place, in at least
their windows, to the pointed one. But the unique consistency of the
pile is scarce at all disturbed by this mixture of styles. It is truly
wonderful how completely the forgotten architects of the darker ages
contrived to avoid those gross offences against good taste and artistic
feeling into which their successors of a greatly more enlightened time
are continually falling. Instead of idly courting ornament for its own
sake, they must have had as their proposed object the production of some
definite effect, or the development of some special sentiment. It was
perhaps well for them, too, that they were not so overladen as our
modern architects with the _learning_ of their profession. Extensive
knowledge requires great judgment to guide it. If that high genius which
can impart its own homogeneous character to very various materials be
wanting, the more multifarious a man's ideas become, the more is he in
danger of straining after a heterogeneous patch-work excellence, which
is but excellence in its components, and deformity as a whole. Every new
vista opened up to him on what has been produced in his art elsewhere
presents to him merely a new avenue of error. His mind becomes a mere
damaged kaleidoscope, full of little broken pieces of the fair and the
exquisite, but devoid of that nicely reflective machinery which can
alone cast the fragments into shapes of a chaste and harmonious beauty.

Judging from the sculptures of St. Magnus, the stone-cutter seems to
have had but an indifferent command of his trade in Orkney, when there
was a good deal known about it elsewhere. And yet the rudeness of his
work here, much in keeping with the