we

Of what is commonly called "Elizabethan” need take no separate account. It was but a phase (I know not who will call it the purest) of the resurrection or Reformation impulse. With Mr. Ruskin it is simply hideous.

Let us breathe a moment. We have disposed of modern architecture in toto. I say disposed, for none can question as to an "honest" use of "irrefragable laws of right." If any think Mr. Ruskin a cold sentimentalist, he has but to hear his exhortation to the “gude folk” of our modern Athens: "Intro

duce your Gothic line by line and stone by stone; never mind mixing it with your present architecture [the very concession shows the total absence of tolerance]; for your existing houses will be none the worse for having little bits of better work in them.” (Edin. Lect. p. 102.)

The irrefragable laws do not stop at modern classic. The reader will remember the sentence about knocking down a couple of pinnacles at either end of King's College Chapel." That order takes us back to the "Seven Lamps: " beneath whose mystic light we stumble on another sentence about

our detestable Perpendicular.”

There can be no more hesitation as to this than the former case. We have seen, in fact, in the preceding chapter, how the characteristic ornaments and pervading features of this style are more or less at variance with the laws of nature. The result is plain: we may take up our estimate, and say, " There go our William of Wykehams, our Waynfletes, and our Wolseys," with all, I think, but a transept of Winchester Cathedral,- some two-thirds, at least,

PERPENDICULAR," AND "EARLY ENGLISH.” 259

of Canterbury,-something like the same portion of York, I know not what not of Gloucester, the east chapels, certainly, at Peterborough, to say nothing of such things as King's College Chapel, at Cambridge; St. George's, at Windsor; or Henry the Seventh's, with all its flying buttresses, at Westminster.

This looks, indeed, very like "the downfall of Gothic architecture." But this is only the "Perpendicular; " we are yet but at the middle of the fifteenth century. Let us go farther back, to the very purest specimen of Gothic the world can show us, I mean our own Early English." What I am about to challenge is so critical, that I must

No one will deny that these graceful shafts make architectural pretension to the support of the superincumbent arches, and of the wall above them. I call on all the Pre-Raffaellites in the world to assert, if they can, that, on the irrefragable principle, such pretension is anything better than a downright lie. The mouldings are built into the wall, and form a part of it: the shaft supports nothing, in most cases not even its own capital! Here is another specimen, no less familiar to the simplest lover of Gothic archi

Those stunted shafts made yet stouter pretensions. Where are they? and why did not the capitals and wall fall with them?

Thanks to time and Mr. Britton, all may know the "honest architecture" of the monks of Croyland. It is needless to say that this astounding falsehood is no solitary one. Not an instance of that purest, loveliest I had almost said holiest of styles-not one of all those beautiful arcades that characterise Gothic architecture - not one of those innumerable detached shafts that people our Gothic walls, but makes the same precise pretension, and tells - on

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PILLARS. 261

the "honest architecture" principle-each its separate and emphatic lie. You have but to take Britton or Rickman, and look for Durham, Lincoln, Wells, Peterborough, Salisbury, Exeter, or almost any of our cathedrals, to find sumptuous chapterhouses, majestic towers, and reverend façades literally masked in this system of constructive falsehood. What might we not say of Byzantine and Lombard churches?

This of detached shafts: what of shafts attached? Look at this section of a cathedral pier. What must

the architectural moralist pronounce of a pillar which is no pillar, but a mere vertical moulding in the solid pier? What but an architectural sham is a single elongated column, supporting a vaulted roof?

Even this, again, as regards the shafts only; but What of the arch? All know the constructive meaning of the word "arch." What shall we say of an arch cut out of a single block? Is that an honest,

or a lying arch? Every tabernacled niche contains three such arches. I leave those who "love the studious cloister" to compute the damages.

But look a moment at any Norman wall that comes first to hand. Here is another fact from Carlisle.

Observe those clustered shafts, and the arches that

spring from them. Will any one tell us that this placing the main support upon the weaker, this implying that the inner arch supports the outer, is not an inversion of constructive logic? an arrangement purely hypocritical?-in fact, a lie? But this is just the pervading arrangement of Norman work. These are

But we have not closed the account. lies in stone: what of arches in wood?

Look at