In the Free Church pulpit I recognized an old friend, to whom I introduced myself at the close of the service, and by whom I was introduced, in turn, to several intelligent members of his session, to whose kindness I owed, on the following day, introductions to some of the less accessible curiosities of the place. I rose betimes on the morning of Monday, that I might have leisure enough before me to see them all, and broke my first ground in Orkney as a geologist in a quarry a few hundred yards to the south and east of the town. It is strange enough how frequently the explorer in the Old Red finds himself restricted in a locality to well nigh a single organism,—an effect, probably, of some gregarious instinct in the ancient fishes of this formation, similar to that which characterizes so many of the fishes of the present time, or of some peculiarity in their constitution, which made each choose for itself a peculiar habitat. In this quarry, though abounding in broken remains, I found scarce a single fragment which did not belong to an exceedingly minute species of Coccosteus, of which my first specimen had been sent me a few years before by Mr. Robert Dick, from the neighborhood of Thurso, and which I at that time, judging from its general proportions, had set down as the young of the Coccosteus cuspidatus. Its apparent gregariousness, too, quite as marked at Thurso as in this quarry, had assisted, on the strength of an obvious enough analogy, in leading to the conclusion. There are several species of the existing fish, well known on our coasts, that, though solitary when fully grown, are gregarious when young. The coal-fish, which as the sillock of a few inches in length congregates by thousands, but as the colum-saw of from two and a half to three feet is a solitary fish, forms a familiar instance; and I had inferred that the Coccosteus, found solitary, in most instances, when at its full size, had, like the coal-fish, congregated in shoals when in a state of immaturity. But a more careful examination of the specimens leads me to conclude that this minute gregarious Coccosteus, so abundant in this locality that its fragments thickly speckle the strata for hundreds of yards together—(in one instance I found the dorsal plates of four individuals crowded into a piece of flag barely six inches square)—was in reality a distinct species. Though not more than one-fourth the size, measured linearly, of the Coccosteus decipiens, its plates exhibit as many of those lines of increment which gave to the occipital buckler of the creature its tortoise-like appearance, and through which plates of the buckler species were at first mistaken for those of a Chelonian, as are exhibited by plates of the larger kinds, with an area ten times as great; its tubercles, too, some of them of microscopic size, are as numerous;—evidences, I think,—when we take into account that in the bulkier species the lines and tubercles increased in number with the growth of the plates, and that, once formed, they seem never to have been affected by the subsequent enlargement of the creature,—that this ichthyolite was not an immature, but really a miniature Coccosteus. We may see on the plates of the full-grown Coccosteus, as on the shells of bivalves, such as Cardium echinatum, or on those of spiral univalves, such as Buccinum undatum, the diminutive markings which they bore when the creature was young; and on the plates of this species we may detect a regular gradation of tubercles from the microscopic to the minute, as we may see on the plates of the larger kinds a regular gradation from the minute to the fall-sized. The average length of the dwarf Coccosteus of Thurso and Kirkwall, taken from the snout to the pointed termination of the dorsal plate, ranges from one and a-half to two inches; its entire length from head to tail probably from three to four. It was from one of Mr. Dick's specimens of this species that I first determined the true position of the eyes of the Coccosteus,—a position which some of my lately-found ichthyolites conclusively demonstrate, and which Agassiz, in his restoration, deceived by ill-preserved specimens, has fixed at a point considerably more lateral and posterior, and where eyes would have been of greatly less use to the animal. About a field's breadth below this quarry of the Coccosteus minor,—if I may take the liberty of extemporizing a name, until such time as some person better qualified furnishes the creature with a more characteristic one,—there are the remains, consisting of fosse and rampart, with a single cannon lying red and honeycombed amid the ruins, of one of Cromwell's forts, built to protect the town against the assaults of an enemy from the sea. In the few and stormy years during which this ablest of British governors ruled over Scotland, he seems to have exercised a singularly vigilant eye. The claims on his protection of even the remote Kirkwall did not escape him.
The antiquities of the burgh next engaged me; and, as became its dignity and importance, I began with the Cathedral, a building imposing enough to rank among the most impressive of its class anywhere, but whose peculiar setting in this remote northern country, joined to the associations of its early history with the Scandinavian Rollos, Sigurds, Einars, and Hacos of our dingier chronicles, serve greatly to enhance its interest. It is a noble pile, built of a dark-tinted Old Red Sandstone,—a stone which, though by much too sombre for adequately developing the elegancies of the Grecian or Roman architecture, to which a light delicate tone of color seems indispensable, harmonizes well with the massier and less florid styles of the Gothic. The round arch of that ancient Norman school which was at one time so generally recognized as Saxon, prevails in the edifice, and marks out its older portions. A few of the arches present on their ringstones those characteristic toothed and zig-zag ornaments that are of not unfamiliar occurrence on the round squat doorways of the older parish churches of England; but by much the greater number exhibit merely a few rude mouldings, that bend over ponderous columns and massive capitals, unfretted by the tool of the carver. Though of colossal magnificence, the exterior of the edifice yields in effect, as in all true Gothic buildings,—for the Gothic is greatest in what the Grecian is least,—to the sombre sublimity of the interior. The nave, flanked by the dim deep aisles, and by a double row of smooth-stemmed gigantic columns, supporting each a double tier of ponderous arches, and the transepts, with their three tiers of small Norman windows, and their bold semi-circular arcs, demurely gay with toothed or angular carvings, that speak of the days of Rolf and Torfeinar, are singularly fine,—far superior to aught else of the kind in Scotland; and a happy accident has added greatly to their effect. A rare Byssus,—the Byssus aeruginosa of Linnæus,—the Leprasia aeruginosa of modern botanists,—one of those gloomy vegetables of the damp cave and dark mine whose true habitat is rather under than upon the earth, has crept over arch, and column, and broad bare wall, and given to well nigh the entire interior of the building a close-fitted lining of dark velvety green, which, like the Attic rust of an ancient medal, forms an appropriate covering to the sculpturings which it enwraps without concealing, and harmonizes with at once the dim light and the antique architecture. Where the sun streamed upon it, high over head, through the narrow windows above, it reminded me of a pall of rich green velvet. It seems subject, on some of the lower mouldings and damper recesses, especially amid the tombs and in the aisles, to a decomposing mildew, which eats into it in fantastic map-like lines of mingled black and gray, so resembling Runic fret-work, that I had some difficulty in convincing myself that the tracery which it forms,—singularly appropriate to the architecture,—was not the effect of design. The choir and chancel of the edifice, which at the time of my visit were still employed as the parish church of Kirkwall, and had become a "world too wide" for the shrunken congregation, are more modern and ornate than the nave and transepts; and the round arch gives place, in at least their windows, to the pointed one. But the unique consistency of the pile is scarce at all disturbed by this mixture of styles. It is truly wonderful how completely the forgotten architects of the darker ages contrived to avoid those gross offences against good taste and artistic feeling into which their successors of a greatly more enlightened time are continually falling. Instead of idly courting ornament for its own sake, they must have had as their proposed object the production of some definite effect, or the development of some special sentiment. It was perhaps well for them, too, that they were not so overladen as our modern architects with the learning of their profession. Extensive knowledge requires great judgment to guide it. If that high genius which can impart its own homogeneous character to very various materials be wanting, the more multifarious a man's ideas become, the more is he in danger of straining after a heterogeneous patch-work excellence, which is but excellence in its components, and deformity as a whole. Every new vista opened up to him on what has been produced in his art elsewhere presents to him merely a new avenue of error. His mind becomes a mere damaged kaleidoscope, full of little broken pieces of the fair and the exquisite, but devoid of that nicely reflective machinery which can alone cast the fragments into shapes of a chaste and harmonious beauty.
Judging from the sculptures of St. Magnus, the stone-cutter seems to have had but an indifferent command of his trade in Orkney, when there was a good deal known about it elsewhere. And yet the rudeness of his work here, much in keeping with the ponderous simplicity of the architecture, serves but to link on the pile to a more venerable antiquity, and speaks less of the inartificial than of the remote. I saw a grotesque hatchment high up among the arches, that, with the uncouth carvings below, served to throw some light on the introduction into ecclesiastical edifices of those ludicrous sculptures that seem so incongruously foreign to the proper use and character of such places. The painter had set himself, with, I doubt not, fair moral intent, to exhibit a skeleton wrapped up in a winding-sheet; but, like the unlucky artist immortalized by Gifford, who proposed painting a lion, but produced merely a dog, his skill had failed in seconding his intentions, and, instead of achieving a Death in a shroud, he had achieved but a monkey grinning in a towel. His contemporaries, however, unlike those of Gifford's artist, do not seem to have found out the mistake, and so the betowelled monkey has come to hold a conspicuous place among the solemnities of the Cathedral. It does not seem difficult to conceive how unintentional ludicrosities of this nature, introduced into ecclesiastical erections in ages too little critical to distinguish between what the workman had purposed doing and what he had done, might come to be regarded, in a less earnest but more knowing age, as precedents for the introduction of the intentionally comic and grotesque. Innocent accidental monkeys in towels may have thus served to usher into serious neighborhoods monkeys in towels that were such with malice prepense.
I was shown an opening in the masonry, rather more than a man's height from the floor, that marked where a square narrow cell, formed in the thickness of the wall, had been laid open a few years before. And in the cell there was found depending from the middle of the roof a rusty iron chain, with a bit of barley-bread attached. What could the chain and bit of bread have meant? Had they dangled in the remote past over some northern Ugolino? or did they form in their dark narrow cell, without air-hole or outlet, merely some of the reserve terrors of the Cathedral, efficient in bending to the authority of the Church the rebellious monk or refractory nun? Ere quitting the building, I scaled the great tower,—considerably less tall, it is said, than its predecessor, which was destroyed by lightning about two hundred years ago, but quite tall enough to command an extensive, and, though bare, not unimpressive prospect. Two arms of the sea, that cut so deeply into the mainland on its opposite sides as to narrow it into a flat neck little more than a mile and a half in breadth, stretch away in long vista, the one to the south, and the other to the north; and so immediately is the Cathedral perched on the isthmus between, as to be nearly equally conspicuous from both. It forms in each, to the inward-bound vessel, the terminal object in the landscape. There was not much to admire in the town immediately beneath, with its roofs of gray slate,—almost the only parts of it visible from this point of view,—and its bare treeless suburbs; nor yet in the tract of mingled hill and moor on either hand, into which the island expands from the narrow neck, like the two ends of a sand-glass; but the long withdrawing ocean-avenues between, that seemed approaching from south and north to kiss the feet of the proud Cathedral,—avenues here and there enlivened on their ground of deep blue by a sail, and fringed on the lee—for the wind blew freshly in the clear sunshine—with their border of dazzling white, were objects worth while climbing the tower to see. Ere my descent, my guide hammered out of the tower-bells, on my special behalf, somewhat, I daresay, to the astonishment of the burghers below, a set of chimes handed down entire, in all the notes, from the times of the monks, from which also the four fine bells of the Cathedral have descended as an heirloom to the burgh. The chimes would have delighted the heart of old Lisle Bowles, the poet of
"Well-tun'd bell's enchanting harmony."
I could, however, have preferred listening to their music, though it seemed really very sweet, a few hundred yards further away; and the quiet clerical poet,—the restorer of the Sonnet in England, would, I doubt not, have been of the same mind. The oft-recurring tones of those bells that ring throughout his verse, and to which Byron wickedly proposed adding a cap, form but an ingredient of the poetry in which he describes them; and they are represented always as distant tones, that, while they mingle with the softer harmonies of nature, never overpower them.
"How sweet the tuneful bells responsive peal!
And, hark! with lessening cadence now they fall,
And now, along the white and level tide
They fling their melancholy music wide!
Bidding me many a tender thought recall
Of happy hours departed, and those years
When, from an antique tower, ere life's fair prime,
The mournful mazes of their mingling chime
First wak'd my wondering childhood into tears!"
From the Cathedral I passed to the mansion of Old Earl Patrick,—a stately ruin, in the more ornate castellated style of the sixteenth century. It stands in the middle of a dense thicket of what are trying to be trees, and have so far succeeded, that they conceal, on one of the sides, the lower story of the building, and rise over the spring of the large richly-decorated turrets. These last form so much nearer the base of the edifice than is common in our old castles, that they exhibit the appearance rather of hanging towers than of turrets,—of towers with their foundations cut away. The projecting windows, with their deep mouldings, square mullions, and cruciform shot-holes, are rich specimens of their peculiar style; and, with the double-windowed turrets with which they range, they communicate a sort of high-relief effect to the entire erection, "the exterior proportions and ornaments of which," says Sir Walter Scott, in his Journal, "are very handsome." Though a roofless and broken ruin, with the rank grass waving on its walls, it is still a piece of very solid masonry, and must have been rather stiff working as a quarry. Some painstaking burgher had, I found, made a desperate attempt on one of the huge chimney lintels of the great hall of the erection,—an apartment which Sir Walter greatly admired, and in which he lays the scene in the "Pirate" between Cleveland and Jack Bunce, but the lintel, a curious example of what, in the exercise of a little Irish liberty, is sometimes termed a rectilinear arch, defied his utmost efforts; and, after half-picking out the keystone, he had to give it up in despair. The bishop's palace, of which a handsome old tower still remains tolerably entire, also served for a quarry in its day; and I was scarce sufficiently distressed to learn, that on almost the last occasion on which it had been wrought for this purpose, one of the two men engaged in the employment suffered a stone, which he had loosed out of the wall, to drop on the head of his companion, who stood watching for it below, and killed him on the spot.