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III. ST. JAMES OF THE DEEP STREAM 237
Better rend the veils in twain for ever, if convenient storeshops may be formed inside.
37. These, then, being authentic epochs of change, you may decipher at ease the writing of each of them,-what is left of it. The campanile with the ugly head in the centre of it is your final Art result, 1601. The portico in front of you is Natalis Regia’s “instauration” of the church as it stood after 1322, retaining the wooden simplicities of bracket above the pillars of the early loggia; the Madonna, as I said, is a piece of the 1320 to 1350 work; and of earlier is no vestige here. But if you will walk twenty steps round the church, at the back of it, on the low gable, you will see an inscription in firmly graven long Roman letters, under a cross, similarly inscribed.
That is a vestige of the eleventh-century church; nay, more than vestige, the Voice of it-Sibylline,-left when its body had died.
Which I will ask you to hear, in a little while.1 But first you shall see also a few of the true stones of the older Temple. Enter it now; and reverently; for though at first, amidst wretched whitewash and stucco, you will scarcely see the true marble, those six pillars and their capitals are yet actual remnants and material marble of the venerable church; probably once extending into more arches in the nave; but this transept ceiling of waggon vault, with the pillars that carry it, is true remnant of a mediæval church, and, in all likelihood, true image of the earliest of all-of the first standard of Venice, planted, under which to abide; the Cross, engraven on the sands thus in relief, with two little pieces of Roman vaulting, set cross wise;-your modern engineers will soon make as large, in portable brickwork, for London drains, admirable, worshipful, for the salvation of London mankind:-here artlessly rounded, and with small cupola above the crossing.
38. Thus she set her sign upon the shore; some knot of gelatinous seaweed there checking the current of the
1 [See below, p. 308.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
