III. From the general arrangement of the Gothic structures, we must now descend to their details; first premising that these appeared in a different order in different countries; all of which seem to have advanced by different paths towards the same object, which they all, about the year 1300, completely attained. Not till then did their several styles arrive at the nearest coincidence; and this only style, common to the various Gothic nations, is that which all have agreed to consider the complete Gothic, as containing all the essential features of the system, viz. 1. Universally pointed arching, each arch being composed of several ribs or mouldings, so arranged that the innermost or narrowest might serve as centering on which to turn the next, on which a still stronger was turned, &c., greatly economizing the original wooden centre; 2. Ribbed-vaulting; 3. Apparent buttresses; 4. Pillar-clustering, with reference to the ribs, each rib (whether of the vaulting or of the arches) being given to a particular shaft; 5. Pinnacle-clustering; 6. Window tracery, with subordination (of principal and minor tracery bars); and, lastly, Foliation, or foiling, an universal though seemingly non-essential ornament. These seven peculiarities may be considered necessary to constitute the complete Gothic; but some very beautiful styles arose before this complete development, by the carrying out of some of these principles alone; and wherever any one of them (especially pointed arching) is consistently observed, a beauty is derived from this consistency. All the styles which completely carry out this principle come under the general term Early Pointed, and are further distinguished as Early English, Early French, &c.; the word 'Pointed' being understood. Of all these, the Early English may be esteemed as decidedly the most Temple church offers a rude approach, viz., a dodecagon with its covering support. ed by six pillars and eighteen arches, all of equal span, dividing the whole into a central hexagon, surrounded by six square and six triangular compartments, all equilateral, and making the thirty lines composing the plan all equal. The preceding example of hexagonal planning approaches the same idea. It represents the two stories of the royal mausoleum at St. Denys, destroyed in the first Frenet revolution.

pure and consistent. It is not confined to England, but nearly so; its only continental localities being Brittany and the western part of Normandy. All provinces further east exhibit various kinds of Early Pointed, different from ours; and some of which were formerly supposed to display a more advanced stage, or a nearer approach to the complete Gothic, than the contemporary English examples. Thus Amiens cathedral, begun in the same year with Salisbury, certainly at first sight appears, with its large four-light windows and varied tracery, much more Gothic than Salisbury, where there is no tracery, or only the first rudimentary effort towards it. But on a closer inspection, we find that much of the Amiens tracery (as the lower nave windows and the great end rose windows) consists of after-additions: that the original windows show no greater advance than some at Salisbury (those of the chapter-house); that the remaining tracery being simply composed of foiled circles or foil-circles* packed together, is no more than what the Salisbury builders may be supposed quite capable of designing, had they possessed the desire, or the funds, for such enrichment; and, lastly, that if the tracery is more complete at Amiens, other features (as the vaulting) are precisely similar in both, while others are decidedly more advanced in England. This is specially the case with the arch-mouldings and pillars, which, even in older buildings than Salisbury, exhibit a richness of clustering far beyond those of Amiens, whose groups of five only, with Corinthian capitals and square plinths and abaci, hardly indicate any advance from the Romanesque.

It is easy to conceive that the Gothic features might have appeared one by one in a different order in different countries, and that while one nation made its first advances by

The nomenclature of Rickman seems on this point more concise and every way preferable to that of Professor Willis, whose foiled arch and foliated arch correspond respectively to Rickman's foil arch and foiled arch, which, to any observer of Gothic buildings, seem hardly to require explanation, the former being where the whole archivolt is broken into several curves, and the latter where these are only inserted within a simple curve.

means of the pointed arch and vault, another invented tra cery or foiling, a third began with the acute spire and pinnacle, a fourth pushed forward the subdividing of the cluster-column and many-shafted jamb. This last was the case with England, where many round-arched examples even are so Gothic in this respect that they present as many vertical lines as any building: Winchester tower, of the eleventh century is an example.

Germany boasts of the first examples of the Gothic arch, and yet, strangely enough, was the very last country to abandon the round arch, which continued to struggle with the pointed forms, and render the "Early German," even down to the middle of the thirteenth century, an incongruous mixture, unworthy the name of a style. In buildings with complete pointed vaulting, and all the beautiful varieties of plan and outline mentioned above, when we turn to the windows, those favorite types for recognizing the Gothic styles, instead of the beautiful grouped lancets of the Early English, we meet with such forms these :

The foiled forms were probably introduced from the East, (being common in Arabic architecture,) and though the Germans were perhaps the first to use these forms extensively, it was long ere they learned their true use, not to be placed alone, but as adjuncts to graver and more simple. forms. The round trefoil arch seems in Germany to have preceded the common pointed one, and in grouping two or more openings under one arch, they aimed at variety rather than unity in their forms. Thus, using the letters T, R, P, and *, to express pointless Trefoil, Round arch, Pointed arch, and foiled circle, we find such combinations as these: