educated persons throughout Europe has been dishonest or ineffectual;
it is only among the labouring peasantry that the grace of a pure
Catholicism, and the patient simplicities of the Puritan, maintain
their imaginative dignity, or assert their practical use.

76. The existence of the nobler arts, however, involves the harmonious
life and vital faith of the three classes whom we have just
distinguished; and that condition exists, more or less disturbed,
indeed, by the vices inherent in each class, yet, on the whole,
energetically and productively, during the twelfth, thirteenth,
fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. But our present subject being
Architecture only, I will limit your attention altogether to the state
of society in the great age of architecture, the thirteenth century. A
great age in all ways; but most notably so in the correspondence it
presented, up to a just and honourable point, with the utilitarian
energy of our own days.

77. The increase of wealth, the safety of industry, and the conception
of more convenient furniture of life, to which we must attribute the
rise of the entire artist class, were accompanied, in that century, by
much enlargement in the conception of useful public works: and--not by
_private_ enterprise,--that idle persons might get dividends out of
the public pocket,--but by _public_ enterprise,--each citizen paying
down at once his share of what was necessary to accomplish the benefit
to the State,--great architectural and engineering efforts were made
for the common service. Common, observe; but not, in our present sense,
republican. One of the most ludicrous sentences ever written in the
blindness of party spirit is that of Sismondi, in which he declares,
thinking of these public works only, that 'the architecture of the
thirteenth century is entirely republican.' The architecture of the