434 APPENDIX, 9, 10

14. A vine leaf with a dragon’s head and tail, the one biting the other.

15. A man riding a goat, catching a flying devil.

16. An eel or muraena growing into a bunch of flowers, which turns into two wings.

17. A spring of hazel, with nuts, thrown all round the quatrefoil; with a squirrel in centre, apparently attached to the tree only by its enormous tail, richly furrowed into hair, and nobly sweeping.

18. Four hares fastened together by the ears, galloping in a circle. Mingled with these grotesques are many sword and buckler combats, the bucklers being round and conical like a hat; I thought the first I noticed, carried by a man at full gallop on horseback, had been a small umbrella.

This list of subjects may sufficiently illustrate the feverish character of the Northern Energy; but influencing the treatment of the whole there is also the Northern love of what is called the Grotesque, a feeling which I find myself, for the present, quite incapable either of analysing or defining, though we all have a distinct idea attached to the word: I shall try, however, in the next volume.

9. P. 39.-WOODEN CHURCHES OF THE NORTH

I cannot pledge myself to this theory of the origin of the vaulting shaft, but the reader will find some interesting confirmations of it in Dahl’s work on the wooden churches of Norway.¹ The inside view of the church of Borgund shows the timber construction of one shaft run up through a crossing architrave and continued into the clerestory; while the church of Urnes is in the exact form of a basilica; but the wall above the arches is formed of planks, with a strong upright above each capital. The passage quoted from Stephen Eddy’s Life of Bishop Wilfrid, at p. 86 of Churton’s Early English Church, gives us one of the transformations or petrifactions of the wooden Saxon churches. “At Ripon he built a new church of polished stone, with columns variously ornamented, and porches.” Mr. Churton adds: “It was perhaps in bad imitation of the marble buildings he had seen in Italy, that he washed the walls of this original York Minster, and made them ‘whiter than snow.’”

10. P. 41.-CHURCH OF ALEXANDRIA

The very cause which enabled the Venetians to possess themselves of the body of St. Mark, was the destruction of the church by the caliph for the sake of its marbles: the Arabs and Venetians, though bitter enemies, thus building on the same models; these in reverence for the destroyed church, and those with the very pieces of it. In the somewhat prolix account of the matter given in the Notizie Storiche (above quoted)² the main points are, that “il Califa

¹ [Denkmale einer sehr ausgebildeten Holzbaukunst aus den frühesten Jahrhunderten in den innern Landschaften Norwegens: 3 parts. By J. C. C. Dahl: Dresden, 1837. The inside view of the church of Borgund is Plate 3 in part i.; the views of Urnes, Plates 1 and 3 in part ii.]

² [See p. 419.]

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