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Those of the upper half are smaller and the masonry is in places careless and irregular. The red brick battlements are square. At short intervals there are walled-up gateways, round-headed or ogival in form, and the whole surface is rent and patched. Centuries of war and earthquakes, rain and fire, have given it a pleasant irregularity, the record of violent and troublous times.
Externally this church is a very simple, prosaic building. Viewed from the front it looks like the second storey bedroom of a cottage; eyed from the side it seems like a long office, four yards from the ground, with a pair of round-headed folding doors below, and at the extreme end a narrow aperture, which apparently leads round the corner. It was built 12 or 13 years ago, for a school, by Messrs.
The round-headed arch widening outwards, its numerous archivolts and mouldings, the slender columns of the deeply-recessed jambs, the storied capitals with their rudely-proportioned but expressive little figures, and the row of uncouth bracket-heads over the crowning archivolt, represent the best art of the eleventh century.
That round-headed tree, with dark rich Portugal laurel foliage, arranged in stars at the end of each twig, is the Mango, always a beautiful object, whether in orchard or in open park. In the West Indies, as far as I have seen, the Mango has not yet reached the huge size of its ancestors in Hindostan.
The rood-screen in the nave was by the pier in which is a small canopied niche. In the north aisle, beneath the windows, is an arcade of round-headed lancets, four in each bay. Above the arcade was originally a string of chevron moulding running along the whole length of the aisle; but this has been hacked off, except beneath the most eastern window.
It was octagonal, with four little round-headed windows, and the hexagonal font was built up from the floor, the rim being level with the top-most of the three steps which surrounded the building. Three steps also descended into it. The city swore fealty to Venice in 1270.
The round-headed windows of both nave and aisles had pierced slabs of stone in them, but in 1740 the openings were made lunette-shaped. One pierced slab of the ninth century has been found, and is now placed high up in the apse above the patriarch's throne.
The lower windows of the nave are of good flamboyant style, with a sort of Romanesque triforium, and a simple round-headed window in each bay of the clerestory, which is the more poor in treatment and effect in that it holds no notable glass. There are none of those distinctly northern accessories, the great rose windows, and the whole reeks of distinctly a milder atmosphere.
So here at Christchurch a seal is in existence on which the church is represented with a central tower of two storeys, the lower plain, the upper lighted by two round-headed windows and capped by a low pyramidal spire or roof with a tall cross on the summit.
Of the round-headed trees, that extend their branches more or less at wide angles from their trunk, the Oak is the most conspicuous and the most celebrated. To the mind of an American, however, the Oak is far less familiar than the Elm, as a way-side tree; but in England, where many "a cottage-chimney smokes From betwixt two aged Oaks,"
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