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The principal doors are deep, elaborately wrought, pointed
arches; and the interior seemed to us, at the moment, as grand as any
that we had seen, and to afford as vast an idea of included space; it
being of such an airy height, and with no screen between the chancel and
nave, as in all the English cathedrals. We saw the differences, too,
betwixt a church in which the same form of worship for which it was
originally built is still kept up, and those of England, where it has
been superseded for centuries; for here, in the recess of every arch of
the side aisles, beneath each lofty window, there was a chapel dedicated
to some Saint, and adorned with great marble sculptures of the
crucifixion, and with pictures, execrably bad, in all cases, and various
kinds of gilding and ornamentation. Immensely tall wax candles stand
upon the altars of these chapels, and before one sat a woman, with a
great supply of tapers, one of which was burning. I suppose these were
to be lighted as offerings to the saints, by the true believers.


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