ponderous simplicity of the
architecture, serves but to link on the pile to a more venerable
antiquity, and speaks less of the inartificial than of the remote. I saw
a grotesque hatchment high up among the arches, that, with the uncouth
carvings below, served to throw some light on the introduction into
ecclesiastical edifices of those ludicrous sculptures that seem so
incongruously foreign to the proper use and character of such places.
The painter had set himself, with, I doubt not, fair moral intent, to
exhibit a skeleton wrapped up in a winding-sheet; but, like the unlucky
artist immortalized by Gifford, who proposed painting a lion, but
produced merely a dog, his skill had failed in seconding his intentions,
and, instead of achieving a Death in a shroud, he had achieved but a
monkey grinning in a towel. His contemporaries, however, unlike those of
Gifford's artist, do not seem to have found out the mistake, and so the
betowelled monkey has come to hold a conspicuous place among the
solemnities of the Cathedral. It does not seem difficult to conceive how
unintentional ludicrosities of this nature, introduced into
ecclesiastical erections in ages too little critical to distinguish
between what the workman had purposed doing and what he had done, might
come to be regarded, in a less earnest but more knowing age, as
precedents for the introduction of the intentionally comic and
grotesque. Innocent accidental monkeys in towels may have thus served to
usher into serious neighborhoods monkeys in towels that were such with
malice _prepense_.

I was shown an opening in the masonry, rather more than a man's height
from the floor, that marked where a square narrow cell, formed in the
thickness of the wall, had been laid open a few years before. And in the
cell there was found depending from the middle of the roof a rusty iron
chain, with a bit of barley-bread attached. What could the chain and bit
of bread have meant? Had they dangled in the remote past over some
northern Ugolino? or did they form in their dark narrow cell, without
air-hole or outlet, merely some of the reserve terrors of the
Cathedral, efficient in bending to the authority of the Church the
rebellious monk or refractory nun? Ere quitting the building, I scaled
the great tower,--considerably less tall, it is said, than its
predecessor, which was destroyed by lightning about two hundred years
ago, but quite tall enough to command an extensive, and, though bare