94 Remarks on Wilton Church. 
new or modern town—an off-shoot of Salisbury hard by, or a resi- 
dence lit on by men of the day in search of a fair, healthy home. 
Nay, our town is, above all—“the County Town,” as having given 
all Wiltshire its name, and as having long been the chief place in it. 
Here lived and died, and were buried, old Saxon kings. Here for 
six hundred years there stood, not a stone’s throw away from the 
town-hall, till Henry VIII. fell upon it, a monastery, aristocratic 
perhaps above all others in the land; and the school where earl’s 
daughters, aud queens soon to be, were trained; and here round the 
abbey, there clustered, it is known, no less than a dozen churches. 
Of these, alas! five can only at present be traced, and our one Parish 
Church is a structure completed 25 or 26 years ago. 
The old church—S. Mary’s—standing close by, being found about 
the year 1840 to be both in an unsafe condition and insufficient in 
point of room for the parish, the late Lord Herbert, then Mr. Sidney 
Herbert, volunteered to provide a new one, and chose for the site, 
a piece of ground in West Street, on which, or near to which, another 
of the twelve former churches of the place, 8. Nicholas, is supposed 
to have stood. 
I will not enter on the history of the construction of the new 
Church except so far as to say that Mr. T. H. Wyatt, was employed 
as its architect, and that the operation of building it engaged the 
constant attention, and liberal interest of Mr. Herbert’s mother, 
the late Countess of Pembroke, as well as her son’s. 
The style which Mr. Herbert selected was no doubt one which he 
had learnt to admire during his frequent visits to Italy, though it 
_ rather defies exact definition. 
There are two churches at Toscanella, near Viterbo, which Mr. 
Fergusson says defy any attempt at classification, and inasmuch as 
Wilton Church bears to one of these,—S. Maria,—at any rate 
externally, a closer resemblance than, I think, any church which can 
be mentioned, we may assert of Wilton Church, that it is impossible 
exactly and precisely to classify it. 
Perhaps I may be excused, if, with a view of more accurately 
explaining the form of our Church, I pause here for a moment while 
I venture very briefly and roughly to examine the history of such 
