And from it, I suppose, he eventually
succeeded in ousting the intruder from
Germany. Was not H. R. H. in the right?
His stall was his vine and his fig-tree, and
who was there to make him afraid?

So much for stalls in the abstract.
Practically, a stall may be defined as a
place of occupation, in relative degrees, of
a canon, a chorister, a cow, a cobbler, or a
connoisseur. To study stalls most profitably
in their ecclesiastical or monastic
aspect, you should go to Flanders or to
Spain. In the grand old cathedrals in
those countries, the traveller has always
free access to the choir, and can take
his surfeit of contemplation of the stalls.
They will be found, to the observant mind,
replete with human interest. They may be
peopled with priests. Pursy prebendaries,
dozing the doze of the just, and dreaming
placidly, perchance, of good fat capon and
clotted cream, while the brawny choirmen
at the lecterns are thundering from huge
oak-bound and brass-clamped folios, on
the parchment pages of which corpulent
minims and breves flounder over crimson
lines; pale, preoccupied priests, fretfully
crimping the folds of their surplices, and
enviously eyeing my Lord Archbishop
yonder, awfully enthroned, with his great
mitre on his head, and his emerald ring
glancing on the plump, white hand which
he complacently spreads over the carved
arm of his chair of state. Will they ever
come to sit in that chair? those pale,
preoccupied men may be thinking. Will they
ever wear a mitre, and hold out their hands
for an obedient flock to kiss? Or will
dignity and power and wealth fall to the
lot of those drowsy prebendaries.

More absorbing, even, in interest to the
stalls in the choir of a cathedral, are those
in a convent chapel. The reason is, I
suppose, that a monk has always been to me a
mystery. A nun I can more easily understand,
for the monastic state, in its best and
purest acceptation, is a dream or an ecstasy;
and there are vast numbers of women who
pass their whole lives in a dreamy and
ecstatic frame of mind, and in a species of
unobtrusive hysterics. But the monk, with
his manhood, and his great strong frame,
and the fire of ambition lambent in his eye,
and his lips firm set in volition, always
puzzles me. Continental physicians will
tell you that in every monastery there will
be found a certain proportion of mad monks,
friars who have strange lunes, and hear
voices while they are sweeping out the
chapel or extinguishing the altar candles,
and to whom the saints and angels in the
pictures on the walls are living and breathing
personages. I remember a dwarfish
Cappuccino at Rome once executing a kind
of holy jig before Guido's famous painting
of the Archangel vanquishing the Demon,
and, as he jigged, taunting the fiend on
the canvas on the low estate to which he
had fallen, and derisively bidding him to
use his claws and fangs. Nor do I think
that I was ever more terrified in my life
than by the behaviour of a gaunt young
friar in the Catacombs of San Sebastiano,
who, opposite the empty tomb of a
renowned martyr, suddenly took to waving
his taper above his head, and to abusing the
Twelve Caesars. He was our guide, and I
thought the candle would go out. But mad
monks, or dreamy or ecstatic monks, are
sufficiently rare, it is to be surmised. Most
of the wearers of the cowl and sandals with
whom I have made acquaintance, seemed to
be perfectly well aware of what they were
about; and a spirit of shrewd and pungent
humour and drollery is not by any means
an uncommon characteristic of male inmates
of the cloister.

As for a Knight of the Garter in his stall,
I regard him simply as an Awful Being.
Understand that, to strike one with
sufficient awe, he should be, not in plain
dress, but in the " full fig" of his most
noble order: a costume more imposing
than the full uniform of the captain of
a man-o'-war; and that, backed by the
man-o'-war herself in the offing, can be
warranted to send any black king on the
West Coast of Africa into fits. But a
K.G., with his garter on, with his sweeping
velvet robe, with his collar and his George,
with his tassels and badges and bows of
ribbons, next to Solomon in all his glory
is the most sumptuous sight I can conceive.
The very stall he sits in, is historical; a
knight of his own name occupied it three
hundred years ago. It bears brazen
chronicle of the doughtiest barons that ever
lived. What should one do to get made a
K.G., and to earn the privilege of sitting in
such a stall? Would the genius of Shakespeare
or Dante, would the learning of
Boyle or Milton, would the imagination
of a Tennyson, the graphic powers of a
Millais, the researches of a Faraday—would
even the giant intellect of a Brougham, help
a man in the climbing upward to that stall?
Not much, I fancy. Its occupancy is to be
obtained only by one process, ridiculously
simple, yet to be mastered only by very few
children of humanity. " Vous vous êtes