I never felt inclined to play the part of the young enthusiast in “Excelsior,” as I looked up at the weathercock which surmounts the spire.  But the man who oils the weathercock-spindle has to get up to it in some way, and that way is by ladders which reach to within thirty feet of the top, where there is a small door, through which he emerges, to crawl up the remaining distance on the outside.  “The situation and appearance,” says one of the guide-books, “must be terrific, yet many persons have voluntarily and daringly clambered to the top, even in a state of intoxication.”  Such, I feel sure, was not the state of my most valued and exemplary clerical friend, who, with a cool head and steady nerves, found himself standing in safety at the top of the spire, with his hand upon the vane, which nothing terrestrial had ever looked down upon in its lofty position, except a bird, a bat, a sky-rocket, or a balloon.

In saying that the exterior of Salisbury Cathedral is more interesting than its interior, I was perhaps unfair to the latter, which only yields to the surpassing claims of the wonderful structure as seen from the outside.  One may get a little tired of marble Crusaders, with their crossed legs and broken noses, especially if, as one sometimes finds them, they are covered with the pencilled autographs of cockney scribblers.  But there are monuments in this cathedral which excite curiosity, and others which awaken the most striking associations.  There is the “Boy Bishop,” his marble effigy protected from vandalism by an iron cage.  There is the skeleton figure representing Fox (who should have been called Goose), the poor creature who starved himself to death in trying to imitate the fast of forty days in the wilderness.  Since this performance has been taken out of the list of miracles, it is not so likely to be repeated by fanatics.  I confess to a strong suspicion that this is one of the ambulatory or movable stories, like the “hangman’s stone” legend, which I have found in so many different parts of England.  Skulls and crossbones, sometimes skeletons or skeleton-like figures, are not uncommon among the sepulchral embellishments of an earlier period.  Where one of these figures is found, the forty-day-fast story is likely to grow out of it, as the mistletoe springs from the oak or apple tree.

With far different emotions we look upon the spot where lie buried many of the Herbert family, among the rest,

  “Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,”

for whom Ben Jonson wrote the celebrated epitaph.  I am almost afraid to say it, but I never could admire the line,

  “Lies the subject of all verse,”

nor the idea of Time dropping his hour-glass and scythe to throw a dart at the fleshless figure of Death.  This last image seems to me about the equivalent in mortuary poetry of Roubiliac’s monument to Mrs. Nightingale in mortuary sculpture,—­poor conceits both of them, without the suggestion of a tear in the verses or in the marble; but the rhetorical exaggeration does not prevent us from feeling that we are standing by the resting-place of one who was