Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

never does he either sing or say, without introducing a full account of the tie which subsists between his own family and that of his author. My friend, I suppose, has written concerning me in much higher terms than I deserve-for I observe that Mr. H-takes it for granted I am a man of wonderful accomplishments. I have lost, however, not a little way in his good opinion, by not having been present at a ball and supper, given on board the flag-ship at Leith, the week before I left Edinburgh. He cannot understand how I should have neglected such an opportunity of exhibiting my Cambrian graces. I might tell him I have had the gout-but am quite willing to sustain the weight of his contempt as it is. It is very bad policy to make a man think he has no point of superiority over yourself. I have no ambition to rival the Toeocracy of Mr. H.

Making some allowances for the prejudices of this gentleman-and, above all, for the jaundiced view he may be expected to give of some of the present prime ones in this mercantile city, and their manner of deporting themselves—and having, as usual, my own eyes about me to correct any misstatements that may creep into his account of things, I imagine I have lighted upon an excellent cicerone. I am sure he is, at least, a civil, and he promises no less surely to be an indefatigable one.

P. M.

LETTER LXVII.

TO THE SAME.

THE situation of the Cathedral of Glasgow has been so exquisitely described in Rob Roy, that it would be quite useless to do any thing more than refer you to it-only the fine pine

trees which, in the novel, are represented as covering the whole of the opposite bank of the ravine, and extending their funereal shade quite to the back of the cemetery-these (miserabile dictu!) have been sacrificed to the auri sacra fames, and that bank is now bare and green, as if black pine had never grown there. The burial-ground, with which the Cathedral is on all sides surrounded, is certainly one of the largest and one of the most impressive I have ever visited. The long and flat grave-stones, in their endless lines, seem to form a complete pavement to the whole surface-making it a perfect street of the dead-the few knots of tall wiry grass and clustering nettles, which find room to shoot from between the layers of stone-work, being enough to increase the dreariness, but not to disturb the uniformity of the scene. The building stands on the declivity of a slight hill, at the bottom of which a brawling rivulet tumbles along with a desolate roar of scanty waters-but it would seem the ground had been dug up originally, so as to give the Cathedral a uniform and even line of foundations. Yet-such in many succeeding centu ries has been the enormous accumulation of the dead, that their graves have literally choked up the one end of the church altogether-so that of a tier of windows which are seen entire at the east, at the west the tops only can be traced, sculptured and ornamented like the rest, just peering above the surface of the encroaching tombs.

The feelings one has in visiting a Gothic cathedral, are always abundantly melancholy, but the grand and elevating accompaniments by which this melancholy is tempered in a Catholic, and even in an English cathedral, are amissingsadly amissing-in the case of a cathedral that has fallen into the hands of the Presbyterians. When one enters one of those antique piles in Southern Germany, or in Spain, (for there only can a Catholic Gothic cathedral be seen in all its glory,) I know not that it is possible for the heart of man to desire any addition to the majestic solemnity of the whole scene. The tall narrow windows, quite dark with the long purple garments of pictured martyrs, apostles, and kings,

tinge every ray that passes through them with the colours and the memory of a thousand years of devotion. The whole immeasurable space below,-nave, transept, and sounding aisles, are left glowing in their bare marble beneath these floods of enriched and golden light-no lines of heavy pews are allowed to break the surface-it seems as if none could have any permanent place there except those who sleep beneath. You walk from end to end over a floor of tombstones, inlaid in brass with the forms of the departed-mitres, and crosiers, and spears, and shields, and helmets, all mingled together all worn into glass-like smoothness by the feet and the knees of long departed worshippers. Around, on every side—each in their separate chapel-sleep undisturbed from age to age the venerable ashes of the holiest or the loftiest that of old came thither to worship-their images and their dying-prayers sculptured and painted above the resting-places of their remains. You feel that you are but a visiter amidst the congregation and home of the dead-and walk with gentle steps along the precious pavement, that answers with a clear prophetic echo to your living tread.

The rich old tapestries which sometimes cover the walls of these cathedrals, mingle better with the storied windows than even the finest of painting or Mosaics-for the exhibition of perfect art throws discredit on rude art, however impressive, and disturbs the uniform eloquence with which the whole should be made to teem. But the greatest of all our wants is, that of the long processions of kneeling priests, which carry the eye onward to the steps of some high illuminated altar-where the blaze of the antique candlesticks comes faint and dim through the clouds of perfumed smoke, swung ever and anon, slow and solemn, from their waving censers. It is, I sometimes think, a thousand pities that errors and corruptions, in far different matters, should have made protestants part with so much of the old hereditary ceremonial of the church. Even the sacred music of our forefathers has been abandoned, as if poison had been breathed from its most majestic notes. Who, that ever heard the

grand simple airs to which the Latin Psalms are chanted in the Catholic cathedrals, can doubt that in them we still hear the very sounds which kindled the devotion of the Origens, the Augustines, and the Gregories? They bear no resemblance to any music of modern days;-they are the venerable relics of that Greek music which consisted only in Melody. And why should we have discarded them?-Or why, having discarded them for a time, should we punish our ears and hearts by refusing to return to them?

But if even we have done somewhat wrong-alas! how much greater have been the errors of our Scottish brethren. The line which we have drawn between ourselves and many of the ideas of our fathers, has been stretched by them into an impassable gulf. It is, indeed, true, that they have replaced what they have lost by many things of another description; but it is not when walking among the melancholy aisles of a deserted or profaned cathedral, that one is most likely to do justice to the value of their substitutes. It is more natural, in such a scene, to hope, that corruptions on the one side being amended, reverence on the other may be restored-that the Christian North may, in some after day, acknowledge that the faults were not all on the part of that South to which she owed arts, arms, and religion; and, in the words of the poet,

"all backward driven,

Roll the barbarian tide, and sue to be forgiven."

The Cathedral of Glasgow, however, with all its nakedmess within, and all its desolation without, is a very valuable thing in Scotland; for it is one of a very few of the great ecclesiastical buildings in this country which escaped from the demolishing fury of the first disciples of John Knox. You have probably read, in some of the historians, the anecdote of the mode of its preservation-indeed, if my recollection serves me, it is mentioned in the novel of Rob Roy. Within, there is only the centre of the choir, which is left in a

cathedral-looking style, with pillars, and scutcheons, and monuments; and here one sees that the whole building, when in its original state, must have been a noble and magnificent specimen of the Gothic architecture, in its best and purest, not its gaudiest age. At either extremity of the Cathedral, spaces have been partitioned off from the nave, sufficient to form large and commodious places of Presbyterian worship; and one of these is fitted up with some taste, as well, perhaps, as the eastern end of a Cathedral can be, where the site of the grand altar is occupied with a pulpit-where the lofty pillars and windows are cut by heavy wooden galleries,—and the floor loaded with rows of snug pews boxed in, and lined with green cloth, for the accommodation of sitting, not kneeling worshippers. The transept seems never to have been finished, for it closes abruptly at either side, so as to afford but a faint idea of the shape of the cross. It runs out at one side, however, for a considerable space, in the shape of a low aisle, with a flat roof, on which, in the old times, a garden had been formed, and where a few very ancient apple-trees may still be seen lingering and drooping along the edge of the stone-work. This aisle has the name of "the dripping aisle," derived, no doubt, from the water which finds its way through the crannies of that crazy roof-a name which, I think, Mrs. Radcliffe would have borrowed for some of the scenes of her horrors, had she heard of it. It is the sepulchre of some particular family of the city or neighbourhood.

Among the other profanations which this fine Old Cathedral has had to sustain, not the least has been the erection of various new buildings in its immediate vicinity, quite hostile to the impression its majestic form, left alone in its churchyard, might be so well fitted to convey. On the one hand, on the very edge of the burial-ground, there has been set up a little abominable would-be Gothic church, in the very worst of all possible styles of Gothic imitation-a thing full of windows and corners, with a roof like a barn-and covered-to the shame be it spoken of people who have such abundance of free-stone at their hands-covered with a rude

« AnteriorContinuar »