The tower of Weatherbury Church was a square erection of fourteenth-century date, having two stone gurgoyles on each of the four faces of its parapet.
Of these eight carved protuberances only two at this time continued to serve the purpose of their erection—that of spouting the water from the lead roof within.
One mouth in each front had been closed by bygone churchwardens as superfluous, and two others were broken away and choked—a matter not of much consequence to the well-being of the tower, for the two mouths which still remained open and active were gaping enough to do all the work.
It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no disputing the proposition.
Weatherbury tower was a somewhat early instance of the use of an ornamental parapet in parish as distinct from cathedral churches, and the gurgoyles, which are the necessary correlatives of a parapet, were exceptionally prominent—of the boldest cut that the hand could shape, and of the most original design that a human brain could conceive.
There was, so to speak, that symmetry in their distortion which is less the characteristic of British than of Continental grotesques of the period. All the eight were different from each other.
A beholder was convinced that nothing on earth could be more hideous than those he saw on the south side until he went round to the north. Of the two on this latter face, only that at the north-eastern corner concerns the story.
It was too human to be called like a dragon, too impish to be like a man, too animal to be like a fiend, and