to have let itself loose to run
riot: there is every variety of expression, from, the most beautiful to
the most goblin and grotesque. One has the leer of fiendish triumph,
with budding horns, showing too plainly his paternity; again you have
the drooping eyelids and saintly features of some fair virgin; and then
the gasping face of some old monk, apparently in the agonies of death,
with his toothless gums, hollow cheeks, and sunken eyes. Other faces
have an earthly and sensual leer; some are wrought into expressions of
scorn and mockery, some of supplicating agony, and some of grim,
despair.

One wonders what gloomy, sarcastic, poetic, passionate mind has thus
amused itself, recording in stone all the range of passions--saintly,
earthly, and diabolic--on the varying human face. One fancies each
corbel to have had its history, its archetype in nature; a thousand
possible stories spring into one's mind. They are wrought with such a
startling and individual definiteness, that one feels as about
Shakspeare's characters, as if they must have had a counterpart in real
existence. The pure, saintly nun may have been some sister, or some
daughter, or some early love, of the artist, who in an evil hour saw the
convent barriers rise between her and all that was loving. The fat,
sensual face may have been a sly sarcasm on some worthy abbot, more
eminent in flesh than spirit. The fiendish faces may have been wrought
out of the author's own perturbed dreams.

An architectural work says that one of these corbels, with an anxious
and sinister Oriental countenance, has been made, by the guides, to
perform duty as an authentic likeness of the wizard Michael Scott. Now,
I must earnestly protest against stating things in that way. Why does a
writer want to break up so laudable a poetic design in the guides? He
would have been much better occupied in interpreting some of the
half-defaced old inscriptions into a corroborative account. No doubt it
_was_ Michael Scott, and looked just like him.

It were a fine field for a story writer to analyze the conception and
growth of an abbey or cathedral as it formed itself, day after day, and
year after year, in the soul of some dreamy, impassioned workman, who
made it the note book where he wrought out imperishably in stone all his
observations on nature and man. I think it is this strong individualism
of the architect in the buildings that give the never-dying charm, and
variety to the Gothic: