e sheltered walks, five
hundred years ago. Some of these old burial-stones, although with ancient
crosses engraved upon them, have been made to serve as memorials to dead
people of very recent date.

In the chancel, among the tombs of forgotten bishops and knights, we saw
an immense slab of stone purporting to be the monument of Catherine
Swineferd, wife of John of Gaunt; also, here was the shrine of the little
Saint Hugh, that Christian child who was fabled to have been crucified by
the Jews of Lincoln. The Cathedral is not particularly rich in monuments;
for it suffered grievous outrage and dilapidation, both at the Reformation
and in Cromwell's time. This latter iconoclast is in especially bad odor
with the sextons and vergers of most of the old churches which I have
visited. His soldiers stabled their steeds in the nave of Lincoln
Cathedral, and hacked and hewed the monkish sculptures, and the ancestral
memorials of great families, quite at their wicked and plebeian pleasure.
Nevertheless, there are some most exquisite and marvellous specimens of
flowers, foliage, and grape-vines, and miracles of stone-work twined about
arches, as if the material had been as soft as wax in the cunning
sculptor's hands,--the leaves being represented with all their veins, so
that you would almost think it petrified Nature, for which he sought to
steal the praise of Art. Here, too, were those grotesque faces which
always grin at you from the projections of monkish architecture, as if the
builders had gone mad with their own deep solemnity, or dreaded such a
catastrophe, unless permitted to throw in something ineffably absurd.

Originally, it is supposed, all the pillars of this great edifice, and all
these magic sculptures, were polished to the utmost degree of lustre; nor
is it unreasonable to think that the artists would have taken these
further pains, when they had already bestowed so much labor in working out
their conceptions to the extremest point. But, at present, the whole
interior of the Cathedral is smeared over with a yellowish wash, the very
meanest hue imaginable, and for which somebody's soul has a bitter
reckoning to undergo.

In the centre of the grassy quadrangle about which the cloisters
perambulate is a small, mean, brick building, with a locked door. Our
guide,--I forgot to say that we had been captured by a verger, in black,
and with a white tie, but of a lusty and jolly aspect,--our guide unlocked
this door, and