preaching to a silly-looking congregation of geese, a favourite subject by the way with the monkish sculptors, and a telling contemporary satire on the priesthood by those who ought to know it best. It is remarkable that this peculiar subject should have been so popular, for I have met with it frequently; there is a good example of the same on one of the miserere seats in St. David's Cathedral. What does it signify?
Still more curious does this strange satire seem when we remember that in the dark ages such carvings were the poor man's only literature, for then even reading was a polite art confined to the learned few, and spelling was in its infancy. One finds it difficult to conjecture why the Church allowed such ridicule of its religious preaching to be thus boldly proclaimed, so that even the unlettered many could hardly fail to comprehend its meaning, for in this case the story meets the eye at once and was manifestly intended to do so.
If we may judge them solely by their carvings the monks of old, at a certain period, appear to have been craftsmen clever beyond cavil, full of quaint conceits, not over refined, often sarcastic, sometimes severely so, but curiously broad in their selection of subjects for illustration. Of course they carved religious subjects as in duty bound, and with painstaking care, but these all look stiff and mechanical, forced and not spontaneous, possibly because they had to work more or less in a traditional groove, and consequently there was no scope for originality; but in their less serious
