Rome, the centre of the world, had often to pass up this valley of the
Moselle, which (as I have said) is a road leading to Rome, and would
halt at fipinal and would at times give money for its church; with
this result, that the church belongs to every imaginable period and is
built anyhow, in twenty styles, but stands as a whole a most enduring
record of past forms and of what has pleased the changing mind when it
has attempted to worship in stone.

Thus the transept is simply an old square barn of rough stone, older,
I suppose, than Charlemagne and without any ornament. In its lower
courses I thought I even saw the Roman brick. It had once two towers,
northern and southern; the southern is ruined and has a wooden roof,
the northern remains and is just a pinnacle or minaret too narrow for
bells.

Then the apse is pure and beautiful Gothic of the fourteenth century,
with very tall and fluted windows like single prayers. The ambulatory
is perfectly modern, Gothic also, and in the manner that Viollet le
Duc in France and Pugin in England have introduced to bring us back to
our origins and to remind us of the place whence all we Europeans
came. Again, this apse and ambulatory are not perpendicular to the
transept, but set askew, a thing known in small churches and said to
be a symbol, but surely very rare in large ones. The western door is
purely Romanesque, and has Byzantine ornaments and a great deep round
door. To match it there is a northern door still deeper, with rows and
rows of inner arches full of saints, angels, devils, and flowers; and
this again is not straight, but so built that the arches go aslant, as
you sometimes see railway bridges when they cross roads at an angle.
Finally, there is a central tower which is neither Gothic nor
Romanesque but pure Italian, a loggia, with splendid round airy