The cathedral at Lausanne is much superior to that of Geneva; and indeed may fairly be esteemed both a beautiful building, and an interesting specimen of art. The nave alone is at present used, the remaining part being under repair. I have met with no history of the building; and the woman who shews it, points out the tomb of a St. Bertrand who lived in the tenth century, as that of its founder; but this is not admissible.
The style of the building, without being precisely like any thing in England, evidently classes with our early pointed architecture. It is anterior not only to tracery and trefoil heads, but to the introduction of roses in the upper part of the windows, and would with us be assigned to about the year 1200. A comparison with French buildings would induce me to place it in the first half of the twelfth century. The piers, or pillars of the nave, are very whimsical, and almost every pair is different. One pair is composed, each of two unequal columns, the little one before the other; yet the largest is only two feet four inches and a half in diameter, with a height of twenty-four feet, and the front one is no more than ten inches and a half in diameter, though as it goes up to the springing of the vault, it must be fifty feet high. In another pair, formed nearly in the same manner, modern improvers have had the courage to cut away the smaller pillar, to make room for some arrangements below. In another pair, each pier is composed of four columns, two large, and two small, entirely detached: the other piers are rectangular, but with small shafts variously attached. The original design evidently provided for two western towers, and an octagonal lantern at the intersection of the cross. One only of the western towers has been erected. The lantern has been carried above the roof, but not completed, and it is now covered with a make-shift roof of tiles, terminating in a wooden spire: the octagon was not carried down to the ground, as at Ely, but rests upon the four piers at the intersection of the cross. I regret much that this is imperfect, as I have met with no example on the continent of the original method of terminating this part, but it seems certain that our great towers, or spires, were not usual.