398 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



tracery which, it forms, singularly appropriate to the archi- 

 tecture, was not the effect of design. The choir and chari- 

 cel of the edifice, which at the time of my visit were still em- 

 ployed as the parish church of Kirkwall, and had become a 

 " world too wide" for the shrunken congregation, are more 

 modern and ornate than the nave and transepts ; and the 

 round arch gives place, in at least their windows, to the pointed 

 one. But the unique consistency of the pile is scarce at all 

 disturbed by this mixture of styles. It is truly wonderful 

 how completely the forgotten architects of the darker ages 

 contrived to avoid those gross offences against good taste and 

 artistic feeling into which their successors of a greatly more 

 ei&g&MBed time are continually falling. Instead of idly 

 courting ornament for its own sake, they must have had as 

 their proposed object the production of some definite effect, 

 or the development of some special sentiment. It was per- 

 haps well for them, too, that they were not so overladen as 

 our modern architects with the learning of their profession. 

 Extensive knowledge requires great judgment to guide it. If 

 that high genius which can impart its own homogeneous cha- 

 racter to very various materials be wanting, the more multi- 

 farious a man's ideas become, the more is he in danger of 

 straining after a heterogeneous patch-work excellence, which 

 is but excellence in its components, and deformity as a whole. 

 Every new vista opened up to him on what has been produced 

 in his art elsewhere presents to him merely a new avenue 

 of error. His mind becomes a mere damaged kaleidoscope, 

 full of little broken pieces of the fair and the exquisite, but 

 devoid of that nicely reflective machinery which can alone 

 cast the fragments into shapes of a chaste and harmonious 

 beauty. 



Judging from the sculptures of St Magnus, the stone-cutter 

 seems to have had but an indifferent command of his trade 

 in Orkney, when there was a good deal known about it else- 



