102 Remarks on Wilton Church. 
—the apse at the other end, slit here and there for its seven lights, 
and sheltering its Lombard crypt, and the tower, tall and stately, 
and growing in grace the longer one knows it, attached to the church 
by a cloister. 
Then passing within, the Basilican form awaits our inspection. 
There are the three long and lofty aisles, divided by columns. 
There is the apse, three apses in short, as there are at S. Pietro in 
Vincoli in Rome, and at Parenzo in Istria. There, above the tops 
of the columns in the nave, extends an arcade, and above it, the 
clerestory windows. ‘There, at the far east end, the altar is reached 
by two flights of steps, is backed by the seats of the clergy (remind- 
ing one much of the church at Torcello), is lighted by windows above 
and behind it, each flanked by an elegant shaft, and crowned with a 
round headed arch. These latter are all Lombardic in type. 
Our apses are all three beautiful, but the central one is certainly 
most so, its elevation alone distinguishing it, and its ornamentation 
being by no means despicable. The fine old glass in the windows, 
nearly all of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the light 
columns and arches, (festooning as it were the sedilia, composed 
both of marble), are for example, well worth attention. The detached 
columns, again, standing forward in the sacrarium, spiral in form, 
made up of mosaics from a shrine of 8S. Maria Maggiore, which was 
erected in Lombardic times, and so happening to be contemporaneous 
in their style with that of the Church, and fitted as lights, the 
tesselated floors, and rich red marble steps, leading up to the apse, 
should not be unnoticed. On one account only I think may the eye 
of the artist be positively dissatisfied. It will look in vain for the 
scenic mosaic, so usual in every note worthy church of the style in 
Italy, and may be impatient perhaps of the far less enduring, and so 
less effective paint which is actually used. Now that Triqueti, 
Salviati, and others have made the acquisition of this ornamental 
completion of ceilings and walls both easy and inexpensive, it does 
seem a matter of regret that some true lover or lovers of the beauty 
of holiness should not take in hand the introduction of mosaic into 
at least the central apse of our Church: than which there can be 
none in the land, in which it would be more appropriate. I have 
