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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 S. 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 



