ridges and hollows of its mouldings,--not a shadow without meaning, and
not a light without life. [Footnote: The two _transepts_ of Rouen
Cathedral illustrate this style. There are plenty of photographs of
them. I take this opportunity of repeating what I have several times
before stated, for the sake of travellers, that St. Ouen, impressive as
it is, is entirely inferior to the transepts of Rouen Cathedral.] But
with this very perfection of his work came the unhappy pride of the
builder in what he had done. As long as he had been merely raising
clumsy walls and carving them like a child, in waywardness of fancy,
his delight was in the things he thought of as he carved; but when he
had once reached this pitch of constructive science, he began to think
only how cleverly he could put the stones together. The question was
not now with him, What can I represent? but, How high can I build--how
wonderfully can I hang this arch in air, or weave this tracery across
the clouds? And the catastrophe was instant and irrevocable.
Architecture became in France a mere web of waving lines,--in England a
mere grating of perpendicular ones. Redundance was substituted for
invention, and geometry for passion; tho Gothic art became a mere
expression of wanton expenditure, and vulgar mathematics; and was swept
away, as it then deserved to be swept away, by the severer pride, and
purer learning, of the schools founded on classical traditions.

You cannot now fail to see, how, throughout the history of this
wonderful art--from its earliest dawn in Lombardy to its last
catastrophe in France and England--sculpture, founded on love of
nature, was the talisman of its existence; wherever sculpture was
practised, architecture arose--wherever that was neglected,
architecture expired; and, believe me, all you students who love this
mediaeval art, there is no hope of your ever doing any good with it,
but on this everlasting principle. Your patriotic associations with it