Page:Letters from England.djvu/94

 The Pilgrim Visits Cathedrals

ATHEDRAL towns are small towns with large cathedrals, in which immoderately long services are held; and the sacristan comes up and enjoins the tourist not to look at the ceiling and the pillars, but to sit down in a pew and listen to what is being sung by the choir. This is the custom of the sacristans in Ely, Lincoln, York and Durham; I do not know what they do elsewhere, as I have not been elsewhere. I heard a huge quantity of litanies, psalms, anthems and hymns, and I perceived that English cathedrals usually have wooden ceilings, in consequence of which the buttress system of continental Gothic has not been developed in them; that the Perpendicular pillars in England have the appearance of complicated water-pipes; that the Protes-