The most extravagant and most monstrously prodigious Hindoo pagodas are not to be mentioned in the same century as the Cathedral of Seville. It is a mountain scooped out, a valley turned topsy-turvy; Notre Dame at Paris might walk about erect in the middle nave, which is of a frightful height; pillars, as large round as towers, and which appear so slender that they make you shudder, rise out of the ground or descend from the vaulted roof, like the stalactites in a giant's grotto. The four lateral naves, although less high, would each cover a church, steeple included. The _retablo_, or high altar, with its stairs, its architectural superpositions, and its rows of statues rising in stories one above the other, is in itself an immense edifice, and almost touches the roof. The Paschal taper is as tall as the mast of a ship, and weighs two thousand and fifty pounds. The bronze candlestick which contains it is a kind of column like that in the Place Vendôme; it is copied from the candlestick of the Temple at Jerusalem, as represented in the bas-reliefs on the Arch of Titus, and everything else is proportionally grand. Twenty thousand pounds of wax and as many pounds of oil are burnt in the cathedral annually, while the wine used in the service of the Sacrament amounts to the frightful quantity of eighteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty French litres. It is true that five hundred masses are said every day at the eighty altars! The catafalque used during the Holy Week, and which is called the _monument_, is nearly a hundred feet high! The gigantic organs resemble the basaltic colonnades of Fingal's Cave, and yet the tempests and thunder which escape from their pipes, which are as large in the bore as battering cannon, are like melodious murmurs, or the chirping of birds and seraphim under these colossal ogives. There are eighty-three stained glass windows, copied from the cartoons of Michael Angelo, Raphael, Dürer, Peregrino, Tibaldi, and Lucas Cambiaso; the oldest and most beautiful are those executed by Arnold de Flandre, a celebrated painter on glass. The most modern ones, which date from 1819, prove how greatly art has degenerated since the glorious sixteenth century, that climacteric epoch of the world, when the human plant brought forth its most beautiful flowers and its most savoury fruit. The choir, which is Gothic, is decorated with turrets, spires, niche-work, figures, and foliage, forming one immense and delicately minute piece of workmanship that actually confounds the mind, and cannot now-a-days be understood. You are actually struck dumb in the presence of such stupendous efforts of art, and you interrogate yourself with anxiety, as to whether vitality is withdrawing itself more and more, every century, from the world. This prodigy of talent, patience, and genius, has, at least, preserved the name of its author, on whom we are able to bestow our tribute of admiration. On one of the panels to the left of the