BOOK THE FIRST: George Somerset
The sun blazed down and down, till it was within half-an-hour of its setting; but
the sketcher still lingered at his occupation of measuring and copying the
chevroned doorway--a bold and quaint example of a transitional style of
architecture, which formed the tower entrance to an English village church. The
graveyard being quite open on its western side, the tweed-clad figure of the
young draughtsman, and the tall mass of antique masonry which rose above him
to a battlemented parapet, were fired to a great brightness by the solar rays, that
crossed the neighbouring mead like a warp of gold threads, in whose mazes
groups of equally lustrous gnats danced and wailed incessantly.
He was so absorbed in his pursuit that he did not mark the brilliant chromatic
effect of which he composed the central feature, till it was brought home to his
intelligence by the warmth of the moulded stonework under his touch when
measuring; which led him at length to turn his head and gaze on its cause.
There are few in whom the sight of a sunset does not beget as much meditative
melancholy as contemplative pleasure, the human decline and death that it
illustrates being too obvious to escape the notice of the simplest observer. The
sketcher, as if he had been brought to this reflection many hundreds of times
before by the same spectacle, showed that he did not wish to pursue it just now,
by turning away his face after a few moments, to resume his architectural
studies.
He took his measurements carefully, and as if he reverenced the old workers
whose trick he was endeavouring to acquire six hundred years after the original
performance had ceased and the performers passed into the unseen. By means
of a strip of lead called a leaden tape, which he pressed around and into the
fillets and hollows with his finger and thumb, he transferred the exact contour of
each moulding to his drawing, that lay on a sketching-stool a few feet distant;
where were also a sketching-block, a small T-square, a bow-pencil, and other
mathematical instruments. When he had marked down the line thus fixed, he
returned to the doorway to copy another as before.
It being the month of August, when the pale face of the townsman and the
stranger is to be seen among the brown skins of remotest uplanders, not only in
England, but throughout the temperate zone, few of the homeward-bound
labourers paused to notice him further than by a momentary turn of the head.
They had beheld such gentlemen before, not exactly measuring the church so
accurately as this one seemed to be doing, but painting it from a distance, or at
least walking round the mouldy pile. At the same time the present visitor, even
exteriorly, was not altogether commonplace. His features were good, his eyes of
the dark deep sort called eloquent by the sex that ought to know, and with that
