By the Bev. Bacres Olivier, M.A. 



101 



the calf and the eagle are constantly met with, and indeed their in- 

 genuity in ornamentation was not inconsiderable, although their 

 west fronts when compared with a Gothic west front may be some- 

 what mean. It is in the interior of the church that their skill, and 

 their taste are most to be seen. The apses are very beautiful, and 

 raised, as they became in later times, by the crypt being built under- 

 neath, they confer on the whole of the church, of which they form a 

 part, a sublimeness, and religious impressiveness which deserved imi- 

 tation. As another feature of this time — exampled in this church 

 and at Verona — I must not pass by the campanile or tower, as well 

 as the cloister. The campanile (originated I fancy in the East) was 

 freely adopted by the Lombards — sometimes surmounting an internal 

 cupola, sometimes built into the angles, and sometimes detached from 

 the church altogether. There was a tower at Ravenna, a round one, 

 as early as the time of Justinian, but inasmuch as Pope Adrian the 

 First was the introducer in fact of bells into Christian churches, few 

 towers could have been known before the Lombard age, connected 

 with churches. 



I would call attention again to the corbel table at S. Zenone which 

 was an ornamentation very favorite with the Lombards, and now 

 remembering that the slender columns in the bevilled jambs of por- 

 ches and windows alike, each one supporting its own round arch, 

 that the use of three portals instead of one at the west end of the 

 church: that the quaint and grotesque designs perceptible now, in 

 pilasters and shafts of all ages — the twisted and fluted and knotted 

 and the spiral, and zig zag, and scroll like — that the horse shoe, and 

 trefoil and even sometimes the Gothic round arch are all of them 

 Lombard points — let us proceed to our parish Church of Wilton, and 

 examine carefully its style. 



We shall see I believe, a Church which you might have seen new 

 in Italy in the twelfth or thirteenth century. We shall see a genuine 

 Romanesque Church. A Church i.e. true in its form to the Basilica 

 type, and true in its outside and inside details to Lombard art. 

 There are the lofty and flat side walls pierced above and below by 

 the small round windows — the western facade presenting the round 

 wheel window, the round arched arcade, the three indented porches 



