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Once entertained, with jovial magistrates and public funds, the idea led speedily to accomplishment; and Edinburgh could soon boast of a municipal Pleasure House. The dell was turned into a garden; and on the knoll that shelters it from the plain and the sea winds, they built a cottage looking to the hills. They brought crockets and gargoyles from old St.
Doubtless, I had ascended by the narrow stairway of the crockets: but to descend by them with a lot of useless senses about me would be a very different matter. No giddiness attacked me as yet; indeed I knew rather than felt my position to be serious.
She is crowned, not with laurel, but with small leaves, I am not sure what they are, being too much injured: the face thin, abstracted, wistful; the lips not far open in their low singing; the hair rippling softly on the shoulders. She plays on a small organ, richly ornamented with Gothic tracery, the down slope of it set with crockets like those of Santa Maria del Fiore.
The same impulse wreathed the crowning cross with a thousand midsummer fancies, till the circle of Eternity, or the triangle of Trinity, which often mingled with its arms, scarcely knew itself. The pinnacles, too, blossomed into crockets and bud-like finials, and began to gather more thickly about the roots of the spire, and from them often leaped flying-buttresses against it.
A flattish gable surmounts it, with a kind of tabernacle work at each end above the figures of Adam and Eve, and a cresting of crockets shaped like eighth-century crockets in a similar situation. In the centre is a little niche with a later figure of S. Laurence, the patron saint. The tympanum is occupied by the subject of the Nativity, arranged in two stages.
The choir terminates with the usual apse, which is further elongated by the far-reaching lady-chapel, which adjoins the main fabric in a graceful and unusual manner. The north tower was completed as late as the sixteenth century, and that of the south was left unfinished, as it is to-day. The gable and its portals are highly decorated with statues, niches, and crockets.
Yet do you suppose that the structural convenience of the redent entirely effaces from the mind of the designer the aesthetic characters which he seeks in the cusp? If you could for an instant imagine this, you would be undeceived by a glance either at the early redents of Amiens, fringing hollow vaults, or the late redents of Rouen, acting as crockets on the outer edges of pediments. 156.
The triangular section of the pinnacles at the base of the spire, the crockets with which they are enriched, and the open canopies around, combine to produce a most graceful feature. To the latter years of this century may be assigned the central porch, with room above, inserted between the two middle piers of the west front. Some regard this as a blemish; others as a distinct improvement.
The new building was in what may be called the florid shingle-Gothic manner. Its pinnacles and crockets and other ornaments were, like the body of the building, all of pine wood, an admirable material, as it is very soft and easily worked, and can be painted of any color desired.
The outside moulding is also interesting, being a wide hollow in the bottom of which circular holes are cut at intervals. Through these can be seen the broad stem from which spring the leaves that ornament the intervening spaces. The arch head is ogee-shaped outside, with large external, and smaller, but not less rich, internal crockets.
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