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The dancing fire filled one of those great pent-house chimneys that witness to the communal life of the Middle Ages. Around and above it, ironwork of a hundred years branched from the ingle-nooks to support the drying meats of the winter provision. A wide board, rude, over-massive, and shining with long usage, reflected the stone ware and the wine.
Still, for all, the hall was made in good and even noble proportion; simple, as should be the abode of a gentleman; over-massive, perhaps, and even destitute of those gracious and symmetrical galleries which we of the South think no shame to take pride in; for the banisters were brutally heavy, and the rail above like a rampart, and for a newel-post some ass had set a bronze cannon, breech upward; and it was green and beautiful, but offensive to sane consistency.
Somehow, without it, in that clear light, one realised, notwithstanding his spectacles, his grizzled black beard of unfashionable shape, his over-massive forehead and shaggy eyebrows, that his, too, was the face of one whose feet were not always upon the earth. "Perhaps," he answered, "it is a matter of degree, yet I am almost tempted to answer your question absolutely.
The monuments on the Acropolis of Athens would be impossible with blocks of the size usual in Syria." Thus there is always something heavy, rude, and coarse in the Phoenician buildings, which betray their troglodyte origin by an over-massive and unfinished appearance. There is also a want of originality, more especially in the ornamentation.
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