172 LAKE LEMAN. And rush melodiously along, With an enfranchised Warrior's song, By cliff and tree, Right joyously: But whence yon Monster Torrent's headlong chase? Ah me! the abhorr'd embrace his sullied waves declare. WELL, this famous Lake Leman, as far as Lausanne at least, is but a dowdy affair after all, in spite of what the depraved and depraving Novelist of Vevay and his zealous Propagandist the minstrel Baron of Newstead have done to bedizen it! Rousseau is at least sincere in his vicious enthusiasm; but as for Byron, he finds himself in the vicinity of such names as Ferney, Clarens, Vevay, &c. remembers Jean Jacques, and forthwith feels it incumbent upon him to rave. The hyperbolical Fiend immediately begins to torment him; and this melancholy incoherence my Lord manifests especially in those stanzas of which Endowed with an average share of natural and incidental beauties, with but feeble pretensions to the sublime, it has been the singular infelicity of this great Reservoir of the Rhone to have acquired a species of celebrity denied to many a more majestic Water: yet surely that is a notoriety little to be envied which derives its lustre from such names as Voltaire, Gibbon, and Rousseau, and founds its hopes of Immortality on so capricious a harp as that of George Noel Byron. Lausanne, September 18th, 1844. Some talk of Dales, And hills in Wales, saith the old ballad. Talk indeed! if they have not seen Lausanne, they don't know what they are talking about. Lovely Lausanne! Romantic Lausanne! what on earth has she been doing? can she have paused upon an earthquake? Emblem of caprice! how has she been coquetting with the valley and the hill? I declare, I do not exaggerate when I affirm my belief that there is not a palm's breadth of level ground from one end of the pavement to the other. One while you find yourself hobbling and panting on the pinnacle of a street, commanding not only the lofty mansions and pictorial towers half buried in the waving foliage of this congregation of hills, but the blue lake, with its bordure of mountains and party-coloured enamel of villages and towers. Anon you are plunged over head and ears either into a deep labyrinth of aged groves, or into some paved ravine, enfiladed by romantic piles, whose antique fronts and towery roofs threaten to make common cause against you, and sepulchre their victim-(whether vestal or not) in their stony embrace. And then to lionize! for lionize you inevitably must. No man who has an eye in his head can forbear attempting at least some scrutiny of this masonic menagerie of mazy streets, old mansions, and still older steeples; and with or without an eye, no man dares disavow the attempt. 66 Che fare?" then, as we say at Rome. I saw yesterday a pair of horses jib in beautiful stile down a hill about as steep as the Montagnes Russes; so much for trusting their legs, I thought of Monkbarn's caustic Sarcasm to Lovel: "True, true, I forgot your Bucephalus. You are a foolish lad by the by, and should stick to eighteen pence aside if you will trust any one's legs in preference to your own." And as for trusting one's own! till I enter the tomb of my fathers shall I ever forget exploring what the guide books call those pleasing varieties of hill and dale, which terminate in that nice old wooden staircase of about one thousand steps, which leads to the Cathedral! It is of course a bagatelle unworthy the dignity of such an ascent, THE EXTERIOR OF THE MINSTER. 175 to observe that a horrible toothache not only accompanied, but to this hour survives it. THE Cathedral of Lausanne rejoices in the renown of being the finest in Switzerland; a distinction it has every appearance of deserving. Like most of our English minsters, it is surrounded by a Claustrum, or Close, composed chiefly of very picturesque turretted piles, grey ramparts, and aged gardens, now a wilderness of fruit trees. Before its Western Front extends a stately terrace of chestnut trees, overlooking literally the steep housetops, the lacquered minarets, loveries, and gourd shaped domes of the collegiate, palatial, and municipal buildings, and confronting even the fine belfroy windows of St. Francois itself. Simple even to severity, the Cathedral of Notre Dame exhibits every variegation of the Lanceolate style; and from this, with only two exceptions, it never departs: for while in the southern porch it is evidently flirting with the Decorated style, in the great western door and window, witness the foliated tracery and the Ogee canopy, it has absolutely revolted to that most gorgeous and elegant Order. To my fancy, the glory of the pile is the Southern Porch: whether you regard its grand proportions, its beautiful figure, three sharp gables with 176 THE SOUTH PORCH. bold trefoils flanked with tall voluted columns, and clustered in the centre of their steep roof into a graceful minaret; or the delicate luxuriance of its interior decorations, especially that triple Arcade of disengaged pillars, I do not remember to have seen its equal. Generally speaking, the exterior of the minster is plain and massive, and its extraordinary galleries of trefoiled and lanceolate apertures, enwreathing nave, choir, and tower, fail to redeem it from the imputation of heaviness. To this, with all its noble Belfroy windows, and its four picturesque turrets, the great Western Tower, or Campanile, deplorably contributes; while on the Central Tower, (not content with having stuck a scraggy spire about as suitable to its bulk as a fools-cap to the Farnese Hercules,) they have -you must see to believe it—in order to deprive its deformity of the last chance of escaping notice -they have gilded the thing from its parapet to its weathercock !— The Interior is so nobly simple in its plan, and yet so incessantly variegated in its detail, the narrow lancet heads of the sweeping apsidal cloister are so graceful, the flat Romanesque arcades in its circular Oriel are so curious, the galleries, with their quatrefoil and trefoil apertures extending in every direction, even to the Clerestory windows, at once so allure and divide the attention, that you have to wait for a second gaze |