X. And now I wish that the reader, before I bring him into St.
Mark's Place, would imagine himself for a little time in a quiet English
cathedral town, and walk with me to the west front of its cathedral. Let
us go together up the more retired street, at the end of which we can
see the pinnacles of one of the towers, and then through the low grey
gateway, with its battlemented top and small latticed window in the
centre, into the inner private-looking road or close, where nothing
goes in but the carts of the tradesmen who supply the bishop and the
chapter, and where there are little shaven grass-plots, fenced in by
neat rails, before old-fashioned groups of somewhat diminutive and
excessively trim houses, with little oriel and bay windows jutting out
here and there, and deep wooden cornices and eaves painted cream color
and white, and small porches to their doors in the shape of
cockle-shells, or little, crooked, thick, indescribable wooden gables
warped a little on one side; and so forward till we come to larger
houses, also old-fashioned, but of red brick, and with gardens behind
them, and fruit walls, which show here and there, among the nectarines,
the vestiges of an old cloister arch or shaft, and looking in front on
the cathedral square itself, laid out in rigid divisions of smooth grass
and gravel walk, yet not uncheerful, especially on the sunny side where
the canons' children are walking with their nurserymaids. And so, taking
care not to tread on the grass, we will go along the straight walk to
the west front, and there stand for a time, looking up at its
deep-pointed porches and the dark places between their pillars where
there were statues once, and where the fragments, here and there, of a
stately figure are still left, which has in it the likeness of a king,
perhaps indeed a king on earth, perhaps a saintly king long ago in
heaven; and so higher and higher up to the great mouldering wall of
rugged sculpture and confused arcades, shattered, and grey, and grisly
with heads of dragons and mocking fiends, worn by the rain and swirling
winds into yet unseemlier shape, and colored on their stony scales by
the deep russet-orange lichen, melancholy gold; and so, higher still, to
the bleak towers, so far above that the eye loses itself among the
bosses of their traceries, though they are rude and strong, and only
sees like a drift of eddying black points, now closing, now scattering,
and now settling suddenly into in