THE FONT in portions of the south aisle, with bosses of foliage at the spring of the arches. In the aisle at the second bay from the west is the grand old Norman font, resembling that at Winchester. There is another at Thornton Curtis in the north-east of the county. Neither of the Lincolnshire specimens are so elaborately carved as that at Winchester, which is filled with scenes from the life of St. Nicholas, but all are of the same massive type, with dragons, etc., carved on the sides of a great block of black basalt resting on a round base of the same, with four detached corner pillars leading down to a square black base. These early basalt fonts, of which Hampshire has four, Lincolnshire two, the other being at Ipswich, Dean Kitchin conclusively proved to have all come from Tournai, in Belgium, and to date from the middle of the twelfth century, a time coinciding with the episcopacy of Bishops Alexander and De Chesney at Lincoln, and Henry de Blois at Winchester. The one at St. Mary Bourne is the biggest, and has only clusters of grapes on it and doves. The other two are at East Meon and at St. Michael's, Southampton, and have monsters carved on them like the Lincolnshire specimens.
Of brasses, in which the cathedral before the Reformation was specially rich, having two hundred, only one now remains, that of Bishop Russell, 1494, which is now in the cathedral library; but in a record made in 1641 by Sir W. Dugdale and Robert Sanderson, afterwards Bishop, is the following most charming little inscription to John Marshall, Canon of the cathedral, 1446, beneath the figure of a rose:—
"Ut rosa pallescit ubi solem sentit abesse
Sic homo vanescit; nunc est, nunc desinit esse."
which may be Englished
"As the rose loses colour not kissed by the sun,
So man fades and passes; now here, and now gone."
The ascent of the towers gives magnificent views; from the central tower one may see "Boston Stump" on one hand, and on the other Newark spire. The big bell, too, has its attractions, but the greatest curiosity is the elastic stone beam, a very flat arch connecting the two western towers, made of twenty-three stones with coarse mortar joints, which only rises sixteen inches, and vibrates when jumped on. Its purpose is not clear,
