

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 399 



where. And yet the rudeness of his work here, much in 

 keeping with the ponderous simplicity of the architecture, 

 serves but to link on the pile to a more venerable antiquity, 

 and speaks less of the inartificial than of the remote. I saw 

 a grotesque hatchment high up among the arches, that, with 

 the uncouth carvings below, served to throw some light on the 

 introduction into ecclesiastical edifices of those ludicrous sculp- 

 tures that seem so incongruously foreign to the proper use 

 and character of such places. The painter had set himself, 

 with, I doubt not, fair moral intent, to exhibit a skeleton 

 wrapped up in a winding-sheet ; but, like the unlucky artist 

 immortalized by Gifford, who proposed painting a lion, but pro- 

 duced merely a dog, his skill had failed in seconding his in- 

 tentions, and, instead of achieving a Death in a shroud, he 

 had achieved but a monkey grinning in a towel. His con- 

 temporaries, however, unlike those of Gifford's artist, do not 

 seem to have found out the mistake, and so the betowelled 

 monkey has come to hold a conspicuous place among the so- 

 lemnities of the Cathedral. It does not seem difficult to con- 

 ceive how unintentional ludicrosities of this nature, introduced 

 into ecclesiastical erections in ages too little critical to distin- 

 guish between what the workman had purposed doing and 

 what he had done, might come to be regarded, in a less earnest 

 but more knowing age, as precedents for the introduction 

 of the intentionally comic and grotesque. Innocent acciden- 

 tal monkeys in towels may have thus served to usher into 

 serious neighbourhoods monkeys in towels that were such 

 with malice prepense. 



I was shown an opening in the masonry, rather more than 

 a man's height from the floor, that marked where a square 

 narrow cell, formed in the thickness of the wall, had been 

 laid open a few years before. And in the cell there was 

 found depending from the middle of the roof a rusty iron 

 chain, with a bit of barley-bread attached. What could the 



