There are thus, to sum up the points to which we have alluded, three sorts
of scars now disfiguring Gothic architecture; wrinkles and warts upon the
epidermis--these are the work of time; wounds, brutal injuries, bruises,
and fractures--these are the work of revolution, from Luther to Mirabeau;
mutilations, amputations, dislocations of the frame, "restorations,"--
these are the Greek, Roman barbaric work of professors according to
Vitruvius and Vignole. Academies have murdered the magnificent art which
the Vandals produced. To centuries, to revolutions which at least laid
waste with impartiality and grandeur, are conjoined the host of scholastic
architects, licensed and sworn, degrading all they touch with the
discernment and selection of bad taste, substituting the tinsel of Louis
XV. for Gothic lace-work, for the greater glory of the Parthenon. This is
the donkey's kick at the dying lion. It is the old oak, decaying at the
crown, pierced, bitten and devoured by caterpillars.

How different from the time when Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre Dame at
Paris to the famous temple of Diana at Ephesus; "so loudly boasted by the
ancient pagans," which immortalized Herostratus, held the cathedral of the
Gauls to be "more excellent in length, breadth, height, and structure!"

Notre Dame at Paris is not, however, what can be called a complete,
definite monument, belonging to a class. It is neither a Roman nor a
Gothic church. The edifice is not a typical one. It has not, like the
abbey at Tournus, the sober massive breadth, the round expansive arch, the
icy bareness, the majestic simplicity of those buildings based on the
semicircular arch. It is not, like the cathedral at Bourges, the
magnificent, airy, multiform, bushy, sturdy, efflorescent product of the
pointed arch.

It is impossible to class it with that antique order of dark, mysterious,