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Remarks on Wilton Church. 



new or modem 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, S. 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 



