Cathedral town

“ Within the city there are no ancient remains, except some massive substruction walls which supported buildings on the hillside. The present town still preserves in parts its medieval aspect. The cathedral, constructed in 1074 at the summit of the hill, is externally plain; it has a fine Gothic interior, somewhat spoilt by restoration, with a good Cosmati pavement, and a canopy and paschal candlestick in the same style. The crypt contains frescoes of the 13th century, and in the treasury are valuable vestments. ”

“ On the height, hard by a grand town-gate, is the now cathedral church, uncouth enough in the external view, and we may fairly say unworthy of its new rank, but which reveals one of the most instructive pieces of architectural history to be found anywhere. ”

“ The cathedral is one of the largest and most remarkable in England, being altogether different in architecture from any other in the Kingdom. Instead of a spire, it has a huge, castellated, octagonal tower, and while it was several hundred years in building, a harmonious design was maintained throughout, although it exhibits in some degree almost every style of church architecture known in England. Ely is an inconsequential town of about seven thousand inhabitants and dominated from every point of view by the huge bulk of the cathedral. ”

“ It has a beautiful cathedral, and churches are to be found in almost every block of the centre of the town. It is a very sleepy place, distinguished for this even in a land where the people are accustomed to take life easily ”

“ The town is traversed by one straight wide street with large houses, but for the most part it consists of narrow lanes. The cathedral has a Romanesque Gothic portal of 1332 by a Roman marble worker named Deodatus, and the interior is decorated in the Baroque style, but still retains the pointed vaulting of 1154, introduced into Italy by French Benedictines ”

“ The modern town stands mainly on the level ground. The most conspicuous building is the cathedral, which is believed to occupy the site of a temple of Jupiter Anxurus; it is enriched both externally and internally with beautiful old columns and Roman mosaics. ”

“ The cathedral church in part dates from the 12th century, but only small portions of the old medieval episcopal palace are now visible, as it was rebuilt about 1823. The ramparts of the old town can still be traced for a long distance, and there are fragments of two moles, of the theatre and of a gate. ”

“ In many cases they have not been destroyed, but converted into small shops. “There are,” writes a local antiquary, “some fine old piazzas in the High Street which have been whitewashed over and hidden.” He suggests that some of these might be restored to the light of day. [551] It would be a worthy deed for the citizens, even in one spot, to bring back the former appearance of their ancient town.
ELGIN CATHEDRAL.
CATHEDRALS IN RUINS.
The noble ruins of the great cathedral Johnson examined with a most patient attention, though the rain was falling fast. ”

“ In a city whose history dates from the ages of silvery bells and stately buildings, there stood, and stands now for aught I know, a cathedral, rich in all the endless fancies of Gothic art. Inside, it was solemn with shade, and gorgeous with light which came in through the elaborate tracery of the stained windows, many-coloured, and broken as the sunbeams through a tropical forest. Outside, fretted pinnacles and carved bell-towers sprang upward, grand yet fairy-like, as if stone towers rose as easily and naturally towards heaven as oaks and pines. ”

“ In what profusion are the antique slabs, with their great brass crosses. How the very atmosphere of the place is fragrant with the memory of the sainted dead! In visiting these cathedrals, in looking on the ruins of ancient abbey or monastery,—so complete in themselves, and exhibiting such evidence of former grandeur,—one is inclined to feel that each is the cathedral of all England,—the Mecca of all the Church; for what is lacking? Not capacity or costliness; not lack of graves of kings, earls, barons, or lords, for here beneath our feet repose the dust of enough such for an entire kingdom. ”

“ The cathedral itself is the heart of the charming old place—so rich in tone, so impressive in outline, so profusely yet delicately adorned, it rose at the end of the long market-square, shedding on it, even through the grey sheets of rain, the warmth of its high tawny masses. The design of the western front is so full and harmonious that it effaces from memory the less salient impression of the interior. ”

“ Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir, and spruce.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty. ”

“ From the height, whence you survey it, the streets are scarcely discernible, and it appears a mass of red tiled roofs. Rich plains stretch on every side down to the sea, and to the not very distant range of mountains, enlivened by white houses, sparkling among mulberry and orange groves. The cathedral itself is not very attractive. Like all other Spanish churches it has no chairs, and it was amusing to watch the different worshippers when the time came to kneel down: plump on the hard pavement knelt the devout peasant ”

“ The cathedral is surrounded by a high wall, the gates of which,--its eyelids,--are closed every night at a seasonable hour, at which the virtuous inhabitants are expected to be in their safe and sacred quarters. Houses within this hallowed precinct naturally bring a higher rent than those of the unsanctified and unprotected region outside of its walls. It is a realm of peace, glorified by the divine edifice, which lifts the least imaginative soul upward to the heavens its spire seems trying to reach; beautified by rows of noble elms which stretch high aloft, as if in emulation of the spire ”

“ The present cathedral was mainly built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Its chief features are a nave with the most magnificent side-aisles in the kingdom, two transepts, a choir, a lady chapel, a large central tower, two bell towers, and a wonderfully fine chapter-house. During the last century it was twice nearly destroyed by fire, first by the act of a lunatic, and then by the carelessness of a workman.
The present structure takes rank with the finest specimens of Gothic architecture in the world.
Apart from the minster, the whole city teems with archaeological interest. ”

“ Shrines and chapels, set in grand, heavy frames of pillared architecture, stand all along the aisles and transepts, and these seem in many instances to have been built and enriched by noble families, whose arms are sculptured on the pedestals of the pillars, sometimes with a cardinal's hat above to denote the rank of one of its members. How much pride, love, and reverence in the lapse of ages must have clung to the sharp points of all this sculpture and architecture! The cathedral is a religion in itself, —something worth dying for to those who have an hereditary interest in it. ”

“ Squatty arcades border the principal streets; there is need of shade under such a sun.
A pretty episcopal palace, in its modern elegance, makes the ugly cathedral still uglier. The poor, abortive monument piteously lifts its belfry, that for three centuries has remained but a stump. Booths are stuck in its hollows, after the manner of warts; here and there they have laid on a rude plaster of stone. The old invalid is a sad spectacle alongside of the new houses and busy shops which crowd around its grimy flanks. ”

“ Seldom in France do we find the cathedral so regally free of surrounding buildings. No shabby structures lean unworthy heads against its old grey walls, and where, on the north side, the canons' library, with its crumbling timbers of the fifteenth century, nestles under the wing of the church, the effect is entirely pleasing. ”

“ There is nothing at all curious in its construction, nor any way remarkable, except the heighth of the piers from which the arches are sprung. Hard by the bridge there is an elegant church, from the top of which you have a very rich and extensive prospect of the city, the sea and the adjacent country, which looks like a continent of groves and villas. The only remarkable circumstance about the cathedral, which is Gothic and gloomy, is the chapel where the pretended bones of John the Baptist are deposited, and in which thirty silver lamps are continually burning. ”

“ In our churches, on the contrary, the population of a city is often congregated for hours; and how magnificently adapted for this object is the vast and solemn interior of a Gothic cathedral, in which the voice of the priest reverberates like thunder, and the chorus of the people rises like a mountain-gust, praising the great Father of all, and rousing the affrighted conscience of the infidel; while the mighty organ, the tyrant of music, rages like a hurricane, and rolls his deep floods of sound in sublime accompaniment! ”

“ The beauty of its site is best appreciated from the lower ground beyond its western suburb. And beautiful it is—the graceful cathedral, with its airy spire and twin towers, pencilled in soft, silvery gray against the dimpled green hills, every feature of the landscape in harmony with it, as if, indeed, made to be in harmony with it. Turning from the cathedral in an opposite direction, in order to make the circuit of the city, we realize how grand was the predecessor of modern Autun the Augustodonum of Gallic Rome. ”

“ The exterior of the Gothic architecture is entirely spoilt by the discoloration of the stone by stress of weather, and the interior produces a curious effect in the morning light, which comes reflected through bright, blue glass. The finest part of the cathedral is the vestry or entrance, containing some beautiful tablets and the statue of Bishop Heber. As no one in India thinks of walking, not even to church, it is here that the waiting crowd, with the police manœuvring at the file of carriages, somewhat resembles the getting away after an entertainment. ”

“ The central parts of the city have broad streets and squares, bordered with fine buildings and mansions in the Italian style, and with good shops. The cathedral, founded in 1794 and finished in 1809, and thoroughly restored in 1903, can accommodate 5000 persons ”

“ The streets are not of the best. They are very narrow, and often arcaded with pointed arches supported on circular columns, but contain few houses of any interest, whilst the churches have been a good deal altered and damaged in modern times.
The cathedral is a recent building of no beauty. Two lions which once supported the columns of a Lombard doorway now carry the holy-water stoups; and in a passage near the sacristy is a carved, painted, and gilded rood of the twelfth century—a piece of furniture which is rarely found remaining in Italian churches. ”

“ The south sacristy door is a fine specimen of Gothic work. Unlike the exterior effect, nothing obtrudes inside this great cathedral. The eye on entering looks straight up to the east, conscious as it travels there, of great pillars rising into the gloom of the vault above, of fine glass and restful solemnity, in which even the chapels in the aisles are lost, to be discovered later on only when searched for. ”

“ Like the Acropolis of Athens, the cathedral of a medieval city was intended to glorify the grandeur of the victorious city, to symbolize the union of its crafts, to express the glory of each citizen in a city of his own creation. After having achieved its craft revolution, the city often began a new cathedral in order to express the new, wider, and broader union which had been called into life. ”

“ In addition to an internal narthex, the cathedral has, in front of its tower, another groined sort of passage-way, opening to the west with six arches, and to the north and south with one arch. There is a second stage above these arches, and then from behind this mass rises the steeple. The whole of this part of the building is Romanesque, as, indeed, is the substance of the entire church though it has been much mutilated by modern additions and alterations. The interior is painfully neglected and dirty, though it is, I believe, the only Catholic church in the place. ”

“ In the centre is an enclosure, and in that is a fine obelisk. The north side of the square is composed of stately dwellings, and they have all the appearance of a palace. The square is built of freestone, and is beautifully tinted by age. The first thing almost we want to see in these fine towns is the cathedral, if there be one. I never thought that I should be so pleased with old buildings as I find I am. Old houses, castles, and churches have somehow strangely taken my fancy. The Cathedral, or, as they here call it, the Abbey Church, is a noble one. ”

“ The cathedral is not without them, but they are confined severely to the neat oval tablet with a gilt frame and gold lettering on a blue or red ground, and they are disposed upon the walls or over the arches in austere devices. And there is none of the tawdriness about the altars that belongs to churches in which people make themselves at home. Indeed, the high altar, and the choir, might belong to a stately Anglican cathedral, with which the common [104] people have about as much to do as with the furnishing of the Deanery.
This cathedral church of St. Saviour is full of happy surprises. ”