SALISBURY CATHEDRAL. 137 



combination. There is nowhere a sufficient breadth and mass 

 of wall, I suspect, to be grand. Once or twice only did it 

 awaken any thing like a sense of sublimity, and then it did not 

 appear to me to be due to any architectural intention. 



Once, late in the day, and alone, I was walking from the 

 end of one transept towards the other, when an emotion 

 came over me, partaking for a moment of awe. Afterwards, in 

 trying to analyze what had occasioned it, I found that my face 

 was turned towards two great, dark windows, a considerable 

 space of unbroken wall about them, and a square, massive 

 buttress, all in the deep shade between the two transepts. 

 From the simple, solitary grandeur and solemnity of the dark 

 recess, there had come a sermon on humility and endurance 

 to me, more eloquent than all else of the great cathedral. 



The wall over and behind this, in an equal space, was bro 

 ken up by three of the triple windows, which, look at the ca 

 thedral from any direction you will, you see every where 

 repeated, until the form becomes tiresome and ugly. Not 

 ugly in itself, but ugly, small, and paltry, by so much repeti 

 tion in an edifice of such grandeur. If all these windows, 

 with all their form, proportion, colour, and fashion of carving, 

 had been the work of one man, they were evidently that 

 man s one idea ; if of many men, then they were servile imi 

 tations. One would be, perhaps, a worthy and beautiful de 

 sign a hundred are paltry, ignominious, mechanical copies ; 

 they might be iron-castings, for all the value the chisel has 

 given them. Why should there not be, with sufficient regard 

 to symmetrical uniformity, evidence in the de-tails of every 

 part of an edifice of such magnitude ? 



There is nothing original in these ideas, but they came 

 upon me freshly and forcibly in trying to see why it was I did 

 not feel more respect for such a monument of architecture. 

 I could not help thinking It is very fine, but it is a failure. 



