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As little did the end of the Mosaic age present itself as probable, judging by externals, to the pilgrim to Jerusalem then, when, for example, the innumerable hosts of Passover-keepers filled the whole environs of the city, and moved incessantly through the vast courts around the sacred space where the great altar sent up its smoke morning and evening, and where the wonderful House stood intact, "a mountain of snow pinnacled with gold."

He produced a poem as pinnacled, deft, and insignificant as Rouen Cathedral. In literature, as in the visual arts, Italy held out longest, and, when she fell, fell like Lucifer, never to rise again. In Italy there was no literary renaissance; there was just a stirring of the rubbish heap. If ever man was a full-stop, that man was Boccaccio. Dante died at Ravenna in 1321.

Thus wherever we find extensive and delicately moulded dunes, poised stones, or slender pinnacled rocks along a coast, we may be sure that since these features were formed the district has not been swept by these great waves.

This great Norman church of St Nicholas with its partly fourteenth century nave, its clerestory, its fine chancel with sedilia and Easter sepulchre, and noble pinnacled tower is perhaps the greatest building in the Marsh. It belonged to the Abbey of Pontigny and was served by its monks who had a cell here, and the town it adorns and ennobles, was the capital of all this district.

Still farther to the right lay the seemingly boundless, rolling forests, forming the eastern and southern rim of this basin of the lakes; whose gradually sloping sides, like some old pinnacled city, were everywhere bristling with the giant forms of the heaven-aspiring pine, and whose nearer recesses were pierced, in the midst, by the long, lessening line of the gleaming Umbagog; while around the whole circle of the horizon, scattered here and there far back into the blue distance, rose mountain after mountain in misty grandeur to the heavens.

The swell of last night, though it did our ship and the "Champlain" some harm, rendered us at least one service, by causing a higher influx of water than usual, which resulted in lifting us off our pinnacled and dangerous resting place into deep soundings again.

"... work, that stood inviolate When axe and hammer battered down the state . . . . . . . . ... the tall Belfry of the Abbey Gate Yet stands majestic, pinnacled, elate, And fills the Vale with music far and wide." The earliest architectural remains are the work of Norman abbots.

We left our shawls and carpet-bags in the salle a manger of the Hotel Faucon, and set forth to find the cathedral, the pinnacled tower of which is visible for a long distance up and down the lake.

As I came out of the brightly lit Galleria Vittorio Emanuele into the darkened Piazza del Duomo I stopped under the arcade and stood looking up at the shadowy darkness of that great pinnacled barn, that marble bride-cake, which is, I suppose, the last southward fortress of the Franco-English Gothic. "It was here," said my host, "that we burnt the German stuff." "What German stuff?"

In the centre of the throng rises the mock Gothic pinnacled market cross, presented to Devizes in 1814 by Henry Addington, afterwards Viscount Sidmouth, who succeeded Pitt as Premier. There is a remarkable inscription upon one side of the pedestal which, for the benefit of those unable personally to peruse it, a portion is here appended: