I have also alluded to the chapel in the Tower of London: of this most perfect and typical example of the very early Norman, I exhibit some illustrations. Severely plain, as befitted the chapel of a fortress, it is, nevertheless, as complete and as well designed a building as could well be produced. Apsidal, with continuous aisles, in two storeys, and vaulted throughout the central space and the upper aisle by unribbed wagon-vaults, becoming in the former case semi-domical on reaching the apse, and the lower aisle groined, it is more perfect in ideal than the choir of any English or Norman church that I am acquainted with of its period, and is parallel in this respect with the great churches of Auvergne, only needing the clerestory to render it a complete type; a model of a perfect choir, with an entire absence (excepting in the capitals of the columns) of ornamental detail. Several of these capitals are like those which prevail in St. Etienne at Caen, and which appear in Remigius’s work at Lincoln; they are a dim reminiscence of the Corinthian capital, with a cross-formed block representing the rosette in the abacus; for, be it always remembered, that the abacus of a Corinthian capital was not the prototype of that of a Romanesque one, in which a substantial impost is superimposed upon the delicate abacus of the classic column. I give drawings from Caen (Fig. 248), from the Tower (Figs. 245, 246, 247), and from Lincoln (Fig. 249), to explain the identity and peculiar characteristics of these capitals. The common cushion capital is also freely used. [Illustration: Fig. 244.--St. John’s Chapel, Tower of London. South Aisle.] I will next go to St. Alban’s; not that I can distinctly assert it to be the next in date; but because it stood first in rank among abbeys, as Canterbury among cathedrals; because it was built by the friend and companion of Lanfranc; and because the crudeness of its material, by divesting it of all decorative features, renders it a more purely typical and elementary example than any other we possess. Founded only ten years after the Dioclesian persecution, when St. Alban became the proto-martyr of Britain,--destroyed during the invasions of Pagan Saxons, and refounded as an abbey during the last years of the eighth century by Offa, king of Mercia,--the church of St. Alban had become famous throughout Christendom. [Illustration: Fig. 245.--St. John’s Chapel, Tower of London. Capital.] The two last Anglo-Saxon abbots having determined on its reconstruction, had incurred great labour in excavating among the ruins of the adjacent Roman city of Verulam to procure materials for the work; but a dreadful famine, followed by the Norman invasion, had prevented the realisation of their intentions. [Illustration: St. John’s Chapel, Tower of London. Capitals. Fig. 246. Fig. 247.]