The interior of the Cathedral is certainly imposing, but I had so early in life attached the idea of the Gothic architecture to every thing magnificent in the way of churches, that this Moro-Spanish style fails to produce an effect commensurate with the merits of the building. Again, images are not associated with my early ideas of divine worship; and when, passing from side altar to side altar, I feel that I am only looking at wax figures, they produce no solemnity in me. And when I afterward learned, or thought I learned, that the showman of the strolling museum got his "wax figures" at the same shop, or from the same moulds in which were cast the images of the saints, they call up the idea of Punch and Judy.
Before these images I have seen hundreds of worshipers prostrate, repeating their prayers with the most profound reverence, while the sight of the image filled me with boyish glee that I could hardly suppress. The identical image that was labeled Bluebeard in the museum is now Saint Peter. The "Disconsolate Widow" is now "the Weeping Virgin." Charlotte Temple, and the baby that never knew its father, is now Mary and the infant Christ. Macbeth, looking as though he had the toothache, is Saint Francis. Othello is here a saint; and the sleeping Desdemona is now the sleeping Virgin. The monster that poisoned six husbands, and sits meditating the death of a seventh, is now dressed in the latest Paris finery, and is a saint. The old miser, who laid up such hoards while he starved himself to death, is here placed among saints; the clothes are different, but there is the same forbidding visage. Here, too, are the Queen of Sheba, the Babes in the Wood, the Belle of the West, the Terrible Brigand, and Sir William Wallace—all transformed into images of saints, before whom the people bow down with the most profound reverence, and to whose intercession they commit the salvation of their souls.
I do not know whether the showman or the priests are to blame for my irreverence, or whether it is the fault of the system itself. The argument