Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 9.djvu/229

THE ABBEY ClIUllClI OF DUUCIIESTER. 109 choir must strike every one who contemplates them even in an engraving, much more in all the niajesty of their actual presence. Their beauty is not at all derived from mere ornament, for, though all their detail is well and elaborately wrought, and the section of the arch-mouldings is very complicated, yet there is no great amount of actual enrich- ment even here, and the pillars, where we should certainly have looked for floriated capitals, are without that most effective of enrichments. Their real merit consists in their perfect proportion, the exquisitely balanced relation between the arch and its pier, and the beautiful form of the former. Now we may at once see that these arches could have stood nowhere but where they do, in a church of large size, but without a clerestory. From a common village church of course their size would exclude them ; in most churches with the same height in the wall as Dorchester, we find a clerestor}', which would at once cut down the dimensions of the arches. Nor can we conceive arches of exactly this proportion carrying a clerestory in a church of greater height. They would never do, like some other forms, such as the tall Perpendicular pillar with its lower and narrower arch, to carry a loiv clerestory. The span and shape of the arch alone might not be amiss in such grand compositions as the presbyteries of Lincoln and Ely ; but in this case the superincumbent mass would require a far more massive pier, and so completely destroy their effect. In fact no other arrangement could have admitted this arcade ; no other arcade would have suited so well with the arrangement emplo3'ed. They are, on the whole, considered sinqDl}^ as arcades, the finest I know, and their beauty is wholly the result of that capital error in the general design, the omission of the clerestory. Arches of not dissimilar propor- tion are found, from the very same reason, in the choir of Stafford Church, wdiicli has the advantage over Dorchester of a much longer vista. Though no more suited to bear a clerestory than these at Dorchester, they had been compelled to groan under one of the poorest character, which our own times have seen happily removed. Edwakd a. Fkeemax. {To he continued.)