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The string-courses were encrusted with stalactites in a manner singularly beautiful. Under the arches a strong mound of solid masonry is built to keep the water in dry seasons at a certain height; But in that mound a gap is left for the salmon, and a way made through the rocks from the Speyne to this gap, which they will soon find out."
The windows were few and small, and the house looked damp and mouldy; lichens clotted the bricks, and moss filled the string-courses. A low door opening from the lane into the garden naturally attracted my attention; but it proved to be of abnormal strength, and bolted both at the top and bottom.
Based, perhaps, on an admiration of one whose later exploits have dwarfed his earlier in the general estimation, there was yet no more resemblance than between the string-courses of a building and its sculptured friezes.
The height of the gable is said to be 103 feet, and that of the towers 110 feet, and the front is divided by the string-courses into four stages. In the central compartment the lowest stage is approached by three steps, and is filled by three doorways, set in a thickening of the wall, and surmounted by gables finished with crosses.
But there are no sub-arches to any of the flying buttresses, and the slopes of each are protected by lead coverings. And in the exterior of the north aisle the same elements of structure and design may be discovered, even to the presence of twelfth-century remains, the curve of the old encircling apse, and the position of the first sills, abaci, and string-courses.
The string-courses have not been made to match either the Transitional or the Decorated. The whole of this Perpendicular work is of very late character, and justifies the belief that it was the last important alteration in the fabric before the dissolution.
First come little columns, and toothed string-courses, then come some pilasters framing long mullioned windows, then a series of blank arches like scales, overlapping one another, and on the sides of the spire wart-like ornaments outlining each spire, the whole terminated by a lantern surmounted by an inverted golden bulb bearing on its tip the Russian cross.
The issue was that the hooded windows, simple string-courses, and random masonry of the Gothic workman, stood elbow to elbow with the equal-spaced ashlar, architraves, and fasciae of the Classic addition, each telling its distinct tale as to stage of thought and domestic habit without any of those artifices of blending or restoration by which the seeker for history in stones will be utterly hoodwinked in time to come.
Here, as elsewhere in this stoneless land, with rare exceptions, the buildings are of brick or rubble, stuccoed and washed, generally in light yellow, with walls three feet or more apart, warmly filled in, and ventilated through the hermetically sealed windows by ample panes in the centre of the sashes, or by apertures in the string-courses between stories, which open into each room.
The east wall of the north arm of the #Transept# has a buttress, as is the case with the south arm. But early thirteenth-century pointed windows take the place of the round-headed ones. There are, however, three string-courses on this wall of the north arm which do not appear on the south. One is the old twelfth-century string which evidently once ran along above the old round-headed windows.
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