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Updated: June 25, 2025


The paintings are few if we except those connected with the initial letter, which serves admirably to illustrate the growth of the border from its pendants, cusps, and graceful finials, showing how the initial and miniature came to be combined.

Neither was Parson Dale very erudite in ecclesiastical architecture. He did not much care whether all the details in the church were purely Gothic or not; crockets and finials, round arch and pointed arch, were matters, I fear, on which he had never troubled his head.

The porch or front entrance is ornamented, but with an entire absence of heavy wood work. The finials and crest along the ridge are light, and harmonize with the general design. The valleys and angles break up the structure in a very pleasing and effective manner, and the elevation, as a whole, is one that will arrest attention. Directly opposite the front entrance is a fountain.

These finials are an addition of the beginning of the century, and are of plaster. They are the work of an Italian sculptor, Bernasconi by name, and, considering the circumstances, are unusually good. Round the tomb is a railing, presented by Archbishop Markham, also of the beginning of the century, and of very poor design.

It was, in fact, a vast, gray-green wooden edifice, with a mansard-roof cut up into many angles, tipped at the gables with rockets and finials, and with a square tower in front, ending in a sort of lookout at the top, with a fence of iron filigree round it. The taste of 1875 could not go further; it must have cost a heap of money in the depreciated paper of the day.

The marble's bluish gray is relieved by sparkling crystallizations, and its unwrought blocks are handled with an ornamental effect in the piers, lintels, and arches, and well set off by a simple high-pitched slate roof, with terra-cotta hiprolls, crestings, and finials. The open porches are both ornamental and useful, taking the place of piazzas. The tower is embellished with a terra-cotta frieze.

On the north side, the six buttresses project 5 feet at the base and rise to the parapet in two stages, which are crowned by gables. These gables have their sides curved inwards and are adorned with crockets and finials, the latter being attached to the front of the gable, while grotesques project from the angles.

These battlements are pierced with cusped circles, below them is a cornice ornamented with foliage. The buttresses of the aisles are decorated with gargoyles and crowned with pinnacles of a considerable size with crocketed spires and finials. The front of these pinnacles is ornamented with characteristic Perpendicular panelling.

The niches are trefoiled and ogee-headed, with crockets and finials and octagonal colonnettes between, springing from corbels, and crowned with imbricated pinnacles; they have piercings resembling window tracery, with rosettes between each repetition.

Turning enters largely into their decorative woodwork, and the turners, who use a very simple form of foot-lathe, are busily engaged in providing the various articles required pilasters for a balcony, hubs for a cart-wheel, or the turned finials of a baby's cot. In a kindred trade the wood-carver is busy producing embellishments for the "kyoung" or "zeyat" which some wealthy resident is erecting.

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