SCULPTURES OF WELLS CATHEDRAL. 65 
disgraceful an occurrence (Mr. Markland remarked) would 
not be permitted to take place, nay, would not be thought 
of, in 1850. 
Seventy years ago, Dr. Johnson lamented, and with too 
great reason, that our cathedrals “ were mouldering by un- 
regarded dilapidation.” Could he now walk into the beau- 
tiful pile, adjoining that hall, what a favorable change would 
he witness in marking the zeal, skill, and reverential 
feelings evinced in the restoration of that exquisite building. 
So far from any due appreciation of our finer Eecclesias- 
tical Buildings it seemed to have been an object, with some 
writers, during a long succession of years to disparage them. 
Evenso gifted a man asEvelyn is foundamongst the number. 
He admits that in the pointed style “there is something 
of solid and oddly artificial too, after a sort,” but, he adds, 
“ the bundles of staves, and other incongruous props to sup- 
port pondrous arched roofs, trite and busy carvings, clumsy 
buttresses, towers, sharp-pointed arches, turrets and pin- 
nacles, breaking the angles of sight, and so confounding it, 
that one cannot consider it with any steadiness, where to 
begin or end” ; all these, he concludes, are “ the offspring of 
a night of ignorance and superstition.”* 
No change in public taste occurred during the next half 
century. Seed, in a sermon delivered before the Univer- 
sity of Oxford, in 1741, speaks of “old gothic buildings 
as an irregular encumbered magnificence, showing a stiff 
awkward state, and an ostentatious pride.”f 
Collinson, the historian of this county, possessed little 
of taste or feeling, but still we might have expected from a 
clergyman and an antiquary something more decorous than 
the following description of this exquisite sculpture—“ one 
* Account of Architects and Architecture, Miscell. Works, p. 366. 
f Discourses, 1757, vol. i., p. 143. 
