The interior of the
cathedral has been covered with a light-colored paint at some recent
period. There is, as I remember, very little stained glass to enrich and
bedim the light; and the effect produced is a naked, daylight aspect,
unlike what I have seen in any other Gothic cathedral. The plan of the
edifice, too, is simple; a nave and side aisles, with great clustered
pillars, from which spring the intersecting arches; and, somehow or
other, the venerable mystery which I have found in Westminster Abbey and
elsewhere does not lurk in these arches and behind these pillars. The
choir, no doubt, is richer and more beautiful; but we did not enter it.
I remember two tombs, with recumbent figures on there, between the
pillars that divide the nave from the side aisles, and there were also
mural monuments,--one, well executed, to an officer slain in the
Peninsular war, representing him falling from his horse; another by a
young widow to her husband, with an inscription of passionate grief, and
a record of her purpose finally to sleep beside him. He died in 1803. I
did not see on the monument any record of the consummation of her
purpose; and so perhaps she sleeps beside a second husband. There are
more antique memorials than these two on the wall, and I should have been
interested to examine them; but the service was now about to begin in the
choir, and at the far-off end of the nave the old verger waved his hand
to banish us from the cathedral.
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