It
was the tomb of a crusader, of one of those military enthusiasts
who so strangely mingled religion and romance, and whose exploits
form the connecting link between fact and fiction, between the
history and the fairytale. There is something extremely
picturesque in the tombs of these adventurers, decorated as they
are with rude armorial bearings and Gothic sculpture. They
comport with the antiquated chapels in which they are generally
found; and in considering them the imagination is apt to kindle
with the legendary associations, the romantic fiction, the
chivalrous pomp and pageantry which poetry has spread over the
wars for the sepulchre of Christ. They are the relics of times
utterly gone by, of beings passed from recollection, of customs
and manners with which ours have no affinity. They are like
objects from some strange and distant land of which we have no
certain knowledge, and about which all our conceptions are vague
and visionary. There is something extremely solemn and awful in
those effigies on Gothic tombs, extended as if in the sleep of
death or in the supplication of the dying hour. They have an
effect infinitely more impressive on my feelings than the
fanciful attitudes, the over wrought conceits, the allegorical
groups which abound on modern monuments.
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