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Updated: June 24, 2025
Alternate courses of white and black marble, cornices loaded with grave or animated portraits of the Popes, sculptured shrines, altars, pulpits, reliquaries, fonts and holy-water vases, panels of inlaid wood and pictured pavements, bronze candelabra and wrought-iron screens, gilding and colour and precious work of agate and lapis lazuli the masterpieces of men famous each in his own line delight the eye in all directions.
There are several effigies, which are not in their original positions, but are conjectured to have belonged to a chapel now destroyed. They are, in the N. transept an abbot and a nun beneath recesses carved with modern reliefs; in the chapel a knight in armour and a lady. In the chapel is some ancient glass, and in the churchyard there is the base of an old cross and two early fonts.
There were two fonts of beautiful type, of different sizes, modeled on the best Arabic calligraphy, and cut by Mr. Hallock at New York. The type were cast in Syria under the supervision of Mr. Hurter.
Here is another of those black sculptured Tournai fonts one of which has been noticed in Winchester. The interior must have presented a curious appearance in the early years of Queen Victoria. During her predecessor's reign the incumbent placed the pulpit and reading-desk at the west end and reversed all the seats so that the congregation sat with their backs to the altar.
It is considered to possess the richest collection in the world of matrices and fonts of types, having them in every written language, and when Pope Pius VII visited the establishment, he was presented the Lord's Prayer in 150 languages.
Recurring to fluids, we find unconquered soda popping up, or down, from innumerable fonts how many, may be inferred from the fact that a royalty of two dollars on each spigot is estimated to place thirty-two thousand dollars in the strong box of the exposition. Nor does this measure the whole tribute expected to be offered at these dainty shrines of marble and silver.
There was nothing left for them but to accept baptism, on which their lives depended, and the worthy bishop and his monks were kept busy at this work for the next two days and nights, the bishop desisting only when, half blind from want of sleep, he dropped down before the altar that had been set up beside the fonts, where the converts were received and signed with the cross.
Bouvard felt with his walking-stick at the spot indicated. They heard the sound of a hard substance. They pulled up some nettles, and discovered a stone basin, a baptismal font, out of which plants were sprouting. It is not usual, however, to bury baptismal fonts outside churches. Pécuchet made a sketch of it; Bouvard wrote out a description of it; and they sent both to Larsoneur.
There were still in those beautiful chambers seats of bright or dark marble, baths of porphyry or Oriental alabaster. But these found their way by degrees to churches. They served for episcopal chairs, or to receive the bones of a saint, or to become baptismal fonts. Yet not a few remained in their desolation till the walls dropped down upon them, or the dust covered them for centuries.
Innumerable temples, Bhuddist and Hindoo, and mixtures of both, occupied hillocks, or were situated near the sacred fonts or groves with which the valley abounds, and which adds much to the beauty of its appearance.
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