but it cannot possibly look large.

Entering it, nevertheless, you will be surprised at the effect of
height, and disposed to fancy that the circular window cannot surely be
the same you saw outside, looking so low, I had to go out again,
myself, to make sure that it was.

And gradually, as you let the eye follow the sweep of the vaulting arches,
from the small central keystone-boss, with the Lamp carved on it, to the
broad capitals of the hexagonal pillars at the angles,--there will form
itself in your mind, I think, some impression not only of vastness in the
building, but of great daring in the builder; and at last, after closely
following out the lines of a fresco or two, and looking up and up again
to the coloured vaults, it will become to you literally one of the grandest
places you ever entered, roofed without a central pillar. You will begin
to wonder that human daring ever achieved anything so magnificent.

But just go out again into the cloister, and recover knowledge of the
facts. It is nothing like so large as the blank arch which at home we
filled with brickbats or leased for a gin-shop under the last railway
we made to carry coals to Newcastle. And if you pace the floor it
covers, you will find it is three feet less one way, and thirty feet
less the other, than that single square of the Cathedral which was
roofed like a tailor's loft,--accurately, for I did measure here, myself,
the floor of the Spanish chapel is fifty-seven feet by thirty-two.

I hope, after this experience, that you will need no farther conviction
of the first law of noble building, that grandeur depends on proportion
and design--not, except in a quite secondary degree, on magnitude. Mere
size has, indeed, under all disadvantage, some definite value; and so