Pictures of this huge petrified triumph of Catholicism over Sun Worship (for the church was built on the site of Moctezuma's gorgeous Temple of the Sun) give a very false impression of grandeur. We had heard, too, much of the marvels within. Nothing could be more disappointing. Perhaps the pile suffers somewhat from its environment. The Grand Plaza is not grand at all. It has no architectural merits; it is crowded with rows of tramcars and bordered by mean-looking shops in stuffy arcades. Round the cathedral run pavements bordered by poorly kept flower-beds and ragroofed booths, and then within the cathedral close is a yard half cobble, half mangy grass, wherein squat or sleep innumerable beggars, fruit-sellers, lottery-ticket vendors, the very riff-raff of the capital. The railings are broken in places, advertisement posters and street-boy scrawlings disfigure the church walls, large pieces of the surface of which are broken away. Polite language forbids a description of what the surface of this God's acre is like: suffice it to say that the indescribably filthy habits of the Mexicans render it no place for the unwary walker. To an Englishman this precinct of their greatest church, so vivid a contrast with the velvety lawns and cleanly sanctity of such a cathedral precinct as that at Westminster Abbey, is eloquent of the Mexican character. The cathedral itself is a gigantic erection, but there is nothing in the least pleasing about it. It seems a hotchpotch of architectural styles (it was near a century a-building), like a dog with no pedigree, or perhaps with too much pedigree--a little bit of everything and the rest church. To any one who has stood in the roar of London's traffic on Ludgate Hill and looked eastward upon the superb grey severity of St. Paul's, such a building can mean little. But step inside, and it is worse, far worse. What is it which so often makes the interiors of even the larger Catholic churches so vulgar? It must be the gilt and colour, the ostentatious striving after effect, the prostitution of what should be divinely chaste to the lewd sensuality of the eye. Catholicism is a sensuous creed. It has been said a million times, and it is a million times true. The sincerely godly man should be able to worship his Maker as well on the top of a Camberwell omnibus as in a cathedral. Catholicism, cynical, knows the sincerely godly are few and far between, and she holds her children to her by a tawdry dazzle, an incensed meretriciousness. The interior of Mexico Cathedral was one of the vulgarest sights it has ever been our misfortune to look on. It was rankly, irretrievably vulgar. The great reredos towered towards the domed roof, a shameless sheet of dazzling gold. Your eyes ached at it. It may have cost £300,000, but to the true lover of churches it was worth about twopence-halfpenny. The walls blazoned with gold-framed pictures of the Virgin and Saints, not one, not two, but dozens, like