After the
elaborate ornament of the rooms we had just been viewing, this venerable
hall looks extremely simple and bare,--a gray stone floor, gray and naked
stone walls, but a roof sufficiently elaborate, its vault being filled
with carved beams and rafters of chestnut, very much admired and wondered
at for the design and arrangement. I think it would have pleased me more
to have seen a clear vaulted roof, instead of this intricacy of wooden
points, by which so much skylight space is lost. They make (be it not
irreverently said) the vast and lofty apartment look like the ideal of an
immense barn. But it is a noble space, and all without the support of a
single pillar. It is about eighty of my paces from the foot of the steps
to the opposite end of the hall, and twenty-seven from side to side; very
high, too, though not quite proportionately to its other dimensions. I
love it for its simplicity and antique nakedness, and deem it worthy to
have been the haunt and home of History through the six centuries since
it was built. I wonder it does not occur to modern ingenuity to make a
scenic representation, in this very hall, of the ancient trials for life
or death, pomps, feasts, coronations, and every great historic incident
in the lives of kings, Parliaments, Protectors, and all illustrious men,
that have occurred here. The whole world cannot show another hall such
as this, so tapestried with recollections of whatever is most striking in
human annals.
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