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Updated: May 14, 2025
The beauty of Wadham is of a singularly quiet and simple kind, the effect of proportion, of string-courses and straight lines, marred by little decoration. Except for buildings annexed from time to time, so plain that they are no disfigurement, the College stands as it stood three centuries ago.
The window immediately below the upper division of the tower is of the same date and character exactly as the one on the west in the like place; and it should be noticed that the sills of the upper windows run on as string-courses, which are continued round the circular angle-shafts of the buttresses. Passing eastward from the tower, the external #Roof# of the nave becomes visible.
The exterior ornamentation of the Sassanian buildings was by pilasters, by arched recesses, by cornices, and sometimes by string-courses. An ornamentation at once simple and elegant is that of the lateral faces of the palace at Firuzabad, where long reed-like pilasters are carried from the ground to the cornice, while between them are a series of tall narrow doubly recessed arches.
As the second stage does not descend so low upon the western face as upon the other faces, the string-course below it, after passing round the corners of the façade, is stopped, and when it is resumed it passes above the sill of the arcade, being carried round the little plinths of the shafts. All the string-courses, it will be noticed, are enriched with the nailhead moulding.
Their arches have more mouldings, their hood-moulds as well as the string-courses are enriched with the nailhead, the dog-tooth is used more profusely, and the piers are clusters of seven engaged shafts instead of five, banded at half their height and having behind them in both tiers passages which formerly communicated with the towers. The glass, by Burlison and Grylls, is worthy of its framing.
The two arcades are vaulted simply, the caps on the first floor have good foliage, and the stories are divided by moulded string-courses. Names of saints are inscribed over the doors of the warehouses opening from the lower cloister. The façade terminates with a fantastic cresting above the roof cornice.
The fact that the distance between the string-courses was already settled by the Transitional bays, compelled the later builders to make their arches round, as a pointed arch of the requisite width would have been too tall. Here the round arch, which is again flanked by two panels, comprises three cinquefoil lights, and the mullions are carried up through the head.
Far less satisfactory is the much more elaborate design adopted at Ctesiphon, where six series of blind arches of different kinds are superimposed the one on the other, with string-courses between them, and with pilasters, placed singly or in pairs, separating the arches into groups, and not regularly superimposed, as pillars, whether real or seeming, ought to be.
The design of the tracery in the rose window is in two orders, based upon equilateral triangles filled in with cusps. Close to the ground on the south-west corner buttress are two string-courses. The lower of these is a billet-moulded course cut, like those to be seen on the south-west tower.
He sent up out of those corbels upright shafts along the walls, in the likeness of the trees which sprang out of the rocks above his head. He raised those walls into great cliffs. He pierced them with the arches of the triforium, as with hermits' cells. He represented in the horizontal sills of his windows, and in his horizontal string-courses, the horizontal strata of the rocks.
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