stery; which, curiously enough,
are always in worse taste than even those of our drawing-rooms. Nor do
I understand how our congregations can endure the aspect of the wooden
sounding-board attached only by one point of its circumference to an
upright pillar behind the preacher; and looking as if the weight of its
enormous leverage must infallibly, before the sermon is concluded, tear
it from its support, and bring it down upon the preacher's head. These
errors in taste and feeling will however, I believe, be gradually
amended as more Gothic churches are built; but the question of the
position of the pulpit presents a more disputable ground of discussion.
I can perfectly sympathise with the feeling of those who wish the
eastern extremity of the church to form a kind of holy place for the
communion table; nor have I often received a more painful impression
than on seeing the preacher at the Scotch church in George Street,
Portman Square, taking possession of a perfect apse; and occupying
therein, during the course of the service, very nearly the same position
which the figure of Christ does in that of the Cathedral of Pisa. But I
nevertheless believe that the Scotch congregation are perfectly right,
and have restored the real arrangement of the primitive churches. The
Chevalier Bunsen informed me very lately, that, in all the early
basilicas he has examined, the lateral pulpits are of more recent date
than the rest of the building; that he knows of none placed in the
position which they now occupy, both in the basilicas and Gothic
cathedrals, before the ninth century; and that there can be no doubt
that the bishop always preached or exhorted, in the primitive times,
from his throne in the centre of the apse, the altar being always set at
the centre of the church, in the crossing of the transepts. His
Excellency found by experiment in Santa Maria Maggiore, the largest of
the Roman basilicas, that the voice could be heard more plainly from the
centre of the apse than from any other spot in the whole church; and, if
this be so, it will be another very important reason for the adoption of
the Romanesque (or Norman) architecture in our churches, rather than of
the Gothic. The reader will find some farther notice of this question in
the concluding chapter of the third volume.

Before leaving this subject, however, I must be permitted to say one
word to those members of the Scotch Church who are severe in their
requirement of th