The internal effect of the church is much finer than its west front would lead one to expect. The plan is simple; a nave and aisles of six bays, transepts with three eastern chapels to each, and a choir of one bay with an apse of four bays projecting beyond the others. The tower is in the angle between the north transept and the nave, and a large sacristy with an eastern apse is built against the south transept. The nave and aisles measure about 230 feet by 104, and the transept 160 feet by 48,--magnificent dimensions undoubtedly. The columns are simple, cylindrical, and very lofty, their capitals carved with foliage, which looks late and poor in its execution, though grouped in the old way in regular tufts or balls of foliage. The arrangement of the wall above the main arcade is very similar to that of the Veronese, and, indeed, to that of most Italian Gothic churches; a plain wall being carried up to the groining, relieved only by a small clerestory window at the highest point. One is apt to compare this arrangement with the artistic arrangement of clerestory and triforium in our own churches; but herein we do not act quite fairly to Nicola Pisano, who is said to have designed the Frari, and his brethren. They had to work in a country where light must be admitted very sparingly, and where therefore it is impossible for architects to revel in the rich traceries which fill the bays of the churches of the North; they lived among a nation of painters, and deemed, perhaps, that these plain surfaces of wall would one day glow with colour and with Scripture story. For these reasons, then, I defend them for the bareness and over-great plainness which are certainly at first felt to be so remarkable in their work. The real beauty of these interiors is owing, more than to anything else, I believe, to the simplicity and purity of the quadripartite groining which covers them in, and which, even where other features would seem to tell of debasement and absence of pure feeling, invariably recalls us to a proper recollection of the infinite value of simplicity in this important feature--a point lost sight of in England after the thirteenth century, to the incalculable detriment of the beauty of some of our greatest churches. It is not difficult to prove that this must be the case, for I take it for granted that we all feel that ornament for its own sake is valueless; and equally, that doing in a troublesome, and therefore costly way, that which may be done as well and as strongly in a simpler manner, is unpleasant and distasteful as an exhibition of the wasteful expenditure of human skill and energy; and therefore, as simple quadripartite groining with diagonal and transverse ribs, and no lierne or intermediate ribs, is quite sufficient for the construction, and as the vaults are in no degree whatever strengthened by the multiplication and ramification of perplexing ribs, such as we see in later days in fan