Page:First impressions of England and its people.djvu/72

 however, is not the best provocative to lively attention; and it is therefore far from wonderful that the fathers dozed. Ingenuity provided a remedy even for this; and the curious visiter will find in the niches of the ruined walls of the ecclesiastical edifices of other days oscillating seats, which turn upon a pivot, and require the utmost care of the sitter to keep steady. The poor monk who would dare to indulge in one short nap would by this most cruel contrivance be thrown forward upon the stone-floor of the edifice, to the great danger of his neck, and be covered at the same time with the 'base laughter and joking' of his brethren."

Externally the Collegiate Church is sorely wasted and much blackened; and, save at some little distance, its light and elegant proportions fail to tell. The sooty atmosphere of the place has imparted to it its own dingy hue; while the soft New Red Sandstone of which it is built has resigned all the nicer tracery intrusted to its keeping to the slow wear of the four centuries which have elapsed since the erection of the edifice. But in the interior all is fresh and sharp as when the field of Bosworth was stricken. "What first impresses as unusual is the blaze of light which fills the place. For the expected dim solemnity of an old ecclesiastical edifice, one finds the full glare of a modern assembly-room; the day-light streams in through numerous windows, mullioned with slim shafts of stone curiously intertwisted atop, and plays amid tall, slender columns, arches of graceful sweep, and singularly elegant groinings, that shoot out their clusters of stony branches, light and graceful as the expanding boughs of some lime or poplar grove. The air of the place is gay, not solemn; nor are the subjects of its numerous sculptures of a kind suited to deepen the impression. Not a few of the carvings which decorate every patch of wall are of the most ludicrous character.