in brick. The buttresses are bold in their formation and scale, but poor
and weak-looking in their design, and finish at the top with pinnacles,
whose thin outline, seen against the deep blue sky, is painfully bad and
unsatisfying. The panelling of the walls is continued up to their whole
height without any decided line of parapet or cornice, and finishes in a
rough serrated line of small gables, which is particularly restless and
wanting in repose. Great flying buttresses span the aisles, and then in
the clerestory is repeated exactly what we have already seen below, the
same panelling, the same parapet, and the same light pinnacles; the
windows, however, are here very small and insignificant, whilst those in
the aisles are remarkable for their large size and for the singular
traceries with which they are filled. All the lower windows are
transomed with a line of tracery, surmounted in each light by a
crocketed canopy running up into the light above. In the apse this
tracery fills the four outer lights only on each side of the two centre
lights, the others being continued without interruption to the sill; and
in these windows it is remarkable that each light is subdivided with a
small monial below this band of tracery.
Altogether, an effect of a prodigious number and repetition of vertical
lines is produced, and yet, notwithstanding this, the effect of the
entire building is decidedly rather horizontal and depressing than the
contrary; this is not more owing to the absence of all visible roofing
than to the way in which the parapets, with their irregular gabled
outline, attract the eye to a markedly horizontal feature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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