fashion peculiarly English, and never adopted to any extent in France. Even on an important cathedral like Salisbury sculpture is wholly absent, and mouldings on arch, base, and capital form the main enrichment.

Except during this Early English period of moulded capitals, however, foliage was used throughout the Middle Ages in both France and England for decoration. For long the ancient classic Corinthian capital furnished the motif for French Gothic carving, and when its details gradually freed themselves from this noble restraint, and supported the square abaci on vigorous leaf-decorated crockets, they struck perhaps the highest note that Gothic foliage carving ever reached. With later periods came a closer imitation of natural forms, and in France a thin and straggling style of both carving and moulding. In England, that recasting of Romanesque forms which was common in France never greatly prevailed. The English carvers, without imitating nature, yet from first to last seized upon its spirit, and through all the periods of English Gothic carved foliage is full of energy, elegance, and vigor, and in its graceful curves and the masses of its trefoil leafage has all the essence of plant life. Although the English figure sculpture never made any approach to the almost classic figures of Chartres and Amiens, yet its foliage was, as a rule, more free and flowing, better massed and less naturalistic, than any but the earliest and finest of French work.

Again, French vaulting, except where the exigencies of the chevet complicated it, was as simple as the mouldings of the arches that inclosed it. But in England But in England a simple scheme of vault ribs was by degrees enriched with subdividing ribs, and the intersections of these ribs were decorated with carved bosses, while the vault surfaces were covered with fanlike tracery, until the design of these elaborate ceilings became, in England far more than in any other country, an imVOL. LXXVI. — NO. 454.

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portant and splendid part of the decorative and constructive scheme.

It would seem, then, that in many details, in his carving, in his vaulting, in his mouldings, the Englishman caught the Gothic spirit at least equally with the Frenchman. Still, as we study the great English church, we find that the clerestory windows rarely occupy the entire space from pier to pier; that the flying buttresses are neither essential nor very frequent; that the vaults are largely supported by thick walls and shallow buttresses, and often spring from a wall instead of from strongly marked piers; and we shall probably come to agree with Professor Moore that such a church is, in a way, merely the earlier Romanesque structure with pointed-arch details. It is in no sense the same organism as the huge French skeleton. In that, with clear mechanical skill, the slender piers that carry the vaults are firmly marked inside and outside; the entire space between the piers is occupied by a traceried window, and the thrust of the vault ribs is carried in a visible manner from the wellmarked piers, over aisle and chapel, to the great outer buttress, which in turn is loaded to security by lofty masses of pinnacle.

The close and accurate study of these Gothic churches is of surprisingly recent date. It is not so very long since men thought them barbarous, uncouth, and not worthy of serious study. Such were the days when whitewash and lack of care wrought more destruction than Puritan and Roundhead, or than Father Time himself. Sir Walter Scott was among the earliest to sing the praises of the Gothic minster. minster. His idea seems to have been that the lines of these lofty arches were modeled upon forest forms.

"Thou wouldst have thought some fairy's hand "Twixt poplars straight the osier wand In many a freakish knot had twined, Then framed a spell, when the work was done, And changed the willow wreaths to stone."

To Sir Walter Scott succeeded Dr.

Whewell, Mr. Willis, Mr. Paley, and others. The origin of Gothic art is found by one in natural forms; by another, in an appreciation for the aspiring forms of the pointed arch, introduced by Crusaders who had become familiar with it in Sicily and the East; and by yet another in a development from Roman art. Mr. Freeman, in 1849, defines the one grand principle of Gothic art as "an upward tendency of the whole building and of its minutest details; in a word, the vertical principle, which, when fully carried out, renders a Gothic cathedral one harmonious whole." In 1860 and 1870, Sir Gilbert Scott and M. Viollet-le-Duc were attributing the origin and introduction of Gothic to structural necessities, to the difficulty of vaulting irregular spaces, and to facility of construction. Recently, a Harvard professor has, in his scholarly work, thrown a new and clear light on this subject. He admits that all these influences may have been at work in the development of Gothic building; he agrees with M. Viollet-le-Duc that its actual origin was in France, and that it was due to constructive needs; but he points out that a brilliantly conceived framework of pier and vault, of buttress and pinnacle, was thus gradually perfected; that this constructive combination contained the most essential spirit of Gothic art; and that, furthermore, in France alone is to be found the perfect result of these fundamental principles. Professor Moore shows us that while England and other countries may boast of national features or peculiar beauties, of the Gothic spirit manifested in certain details, yet in France alone do we find the whole structure of a cathedral one fully organized and visible framework, which the wealth of applied ornament only serves to emphasize.

But let us gain a closer view of a French church, and, as is the wont of travelers, hasten from our inn to the cathedral. From a distance we see it o'ertopping the steep-roofed town. Its walls.

consist of piers alternating with huge traceried windows. This slender masonry is steadied by the arches of the countless flying buttresses. They cross the low aisles in giant leaps, and carry the thrust of the vaulted stone ceilings to the surrounding buttresses, which, firmly weighted by the lofty crocketed pinnacles, stand like a row of guardian sentinels around the building. At the east end these splendid scaffoldings radiate around the circular apsis and span the chapels which skirt it. Far above them and over the crossing of nave and transept, the lofty flèche, that "transparent fretwork which seems to bend to the west wind," decked with pinnacles and statues, its silverwhite lead brightened by faded color and gold, shoots into the blue, and bears its cross three hundred and sixty feet nearer to heaven's vault than the gazer on the pavement below.

The bishop's palace is hard by, a dignified but ascetic-looking abode, and the dwellings of the old town climb upon and cling to the sides of the church. There is no green lawn, no quiet close, no cosy dwelling for the priests, joined to this great serious structure, but from the stone - paved place, where white - capped bonnes and red-trousered soldiers now gossip and chatter, broad steps lead to the platform before the three cavernous portals of the cathedral.

And how gloriously peopled are these triumphal arches! With native skill joined evidently to an observation of the antique, the naïve sculptors have crowded the stonework with representations of the virtues, the signs of the zodiac, the handicrafts, and the employments of the seasons. Here we find Adam and Eve, the wise and foolish virgins, the Magi, the Apostles, while in the centre is portrayed the Last Judgment and Christ bearing the Gospels. Above all this, ranks of angels and seraphim fill the retreating arches, so that at every door these glorious celestial choirs meet over your head as you enter the church. Above

the crocketed gables and serried pinnacles of these porches stand the statues of Judah's kings, and over them story upon story of arcades rise around the great rose window to the pointed gable, and to the tops of the two towers that await spires which will never crown them. Crockets and leafage, statue and bas-relief, gargoyle and pinnacle, are scattered over this gorgeous façade in sufficient abundance to furnish two or three such fronts as that of the Somersetshire cathedral, and all is in key with the great doorways and the majestic scaffold of buttresses. All is simple, masculine, confident. Everywhere you recognize technical skill and brilliant execution. There is nothing tentative or simply picturesque.

It is Sunday, and the vast nave is thronged with ardent worshipers, bowed in solemn adoration before the mysteries of the mass. Around the entrances and in secluded aisles there is stir and movement. People come and go with utter absence of self-consciousness. The citydressed son escorts his country-clad parents. Little children patter about the doorways in their clattering wooden shoes, and offer each other holy water with their finger-tips. All is done with healthy, unaffected simplicity and directness. On other days than Sunday it is much the same. Just as humble dwellings cluster against the walls of these great French churches, so distinctions of poverty and wealth have no place in this meetingground for all classes. Riches and poverty no longer count. The tawdry shrine, the ignorance that prompts it, the begging at the doors, are but incidents of the scene. The serious and vital subjects are those portrayed in the carvings of the doorways. Life and death, hell and heaven, the last judgment, virtue and vice, these are the great themes as they were when the cathedral was built. To the intense French mind the grand and the majestic appealed more than the picturesque, and hence the splendor of these lofty naves and arches, of these high

pointed gables and these serried ranks of stately sculpture.

The Gothic architecture of France had its birth amid struggles for civil liberty. Human ambitions and civic pride, perhaps, quite as much as religious feeling, inspired the builders, as king and bishop and people thus asserted themselves against the power of monk or of abbey, and city vied with city in raising each a loftier and more glorious shrine than the other. But no such feelings stirred the Englishman. He seems to have had the single wish to make his temples worthy and beautiful. It may be partly for this reason that the distinguishing and precious qualities of English work are found in quiet beauty of detail and in picturesqueness of general composition; while those of the French are the results of consummate constructive skill, joined to majestic, ambitious, brilliant, and spirited work in the arts of design.

Thus far we have been speaking mainly of cathedral churches, but before we close this comparison let us for a moment leave the cathedrals, and consider the smaller churches. In them we find that those in the French villages and the lesser ones in the French towns are not rural but urban in character, and that, in a smaller way, they imitate and copy the methods and the detail of the neighboring great city churches. The roundarched semi-Byzantine churches of Auvergne, the Romanesque churches of Provence, the domed churches of the Périgord, and the Gothic churches of the Isle of France all imitate the methods and the detail found in neighboring cities, and nowhere is one sensible of attempts to link the architecture to the scenery. In all these churches stone vaulting prevails. Even when the stone vaults do not exist, the structure is generally prepared for them. Gothic architecture, as we have seen, meant to the Frenchman a complete system of vaulting ribs and arched vault surfaces, of flying buttress and pinnacle-loaded pier,

and this is found with more or less completeness throughout even the smaller French churches. If one of them fails in these monumental characteristics, it is because of poverty or through decay.

In England, however, the rural church fits the country, and not the city, and it called out the best of the poetry and feeling that there was in her mediæval designers. In place of stone vaults we find rich oak ceilings with carved trusses and beams. As there are no vaults to prop up, the flying buttress scarcely appears, and the simple buttress only strengthens the walls or resists the sway of the clanging bells. But how graceful are the spires that crown the villages of Northamptonshire, how stately the towers, capped with lacelike parapets and bracketed pinnacles, that terminate the churches of Somersetshire; and everywhere all over England are found those innumerable short, stumpy towers, with battlemented tops and buttressed corners, which blend so charmingly with the yews of the churchyard, with the oaks and beeches of the parks, and with the undulating meadows and waving cornfields of a rustic landscape. If the English cathedral seems to be adapted with difficulty to the uses of Protestant worship, the same cannot be said of the parish church. Around this centres, if not exactly the life of the neighborhood, at least its sentiment and its affections, while in death the squire and his family lie beneath its monuments, and the rude forefathers of the village sleep in its shadow. The little country church has much the same qualities as the old English country house, and the two are the unique architectural possessions of England, equaled nowhere else in variety of design, in the concord between structure and site, and in gracious outline and grouping. So numerous and conspicuous are they that the traveler finds it hard to believe they do not occupy the whole field. With surprise we meet the vigorous, rudevoiced, self-asserting Salvation Army

preaching at the village crosses, and discover that dissent flourishes, and remember that disestablishment is not an impossibility.

In by far the larger part of the English churches the detail one now sees is late and of the Perpendicular period. While the Early English and Decorated periods had national peculiarities, they were cousins of similar work across the Channel, but Perpendicular Gothic was a distinctly English growth. At Winchester it is vastly impressive; in the small churches it is frequent and picturesque. But while Gothic thus spent its last forces in England upon somewhat mechanical and unimaginative lines, France gave rein to fantasy, and with overflowing license covered her latest buildings with Flamboyant detail.

A beautiful product is this Flamboyant work, whether it appears in the flowing bars of window tracery and the flaming rays of the great roses, or whether it covers with its dainty tabernacle work the deep recesses of porches, or whether it rises in stone pinnacle or oak canopy to a forest network of buttress and crocket and finial that rivals the intricacies of woodland branches. You feel that the work of the thirteenth century satisfies reason and better deserves the student's attention, but still your eyes delight in this fairylike construction and these fanciful creations. If you try to sketch this work, you respect still more the poetic genius that invented it and the art that carried it to perfection. Before the lacelike portals of St. Maclou and the intricate convolutions of the "crown of Normandy" and the wonderful gables of the Courts of Justice in Rouen, you recognize that the farthest bound has been reached, — that the end has come. But only a philosopher could bring himself to say that Gothic architecture thus met its fate in a sad decline. The artist feels rather that in its latest hours, when its work was done, it yielded itself wholly to romantic fancy; that, with

a fairy touch, it spent itself upon flaring crocket and interwoven moulding, upon tangled snarls of miniature buttress and complicated pinnacle, upon a sylvan

growth of window tracery and panel work; and that in this brilliant, fiery burst of flaming beauty the end of mediæval architecture was indeed glorious. Robert Swain Peabody.

WHOEVER Knows Whitby, in the North Riding, merely at second-hand knows it, of course, by the old associations that so often have the effect of making the past the only apparently real thing in England, the present simply a necessary startingpoint for excursions into it. No fitter place than Whitby can be found for setting out on those backward journeys of the mind, in comparison with which length of mile is but a slight affair, yet which are so exhilaratingly free from bodily effort or physical drawback. Here is the cliff from which Cadmon looked up at the stars or out over the sea, while he sang of their creation. From this same eventful cliff thought as naturally also travels back to the Saxon abbess, Hilda, whose cloisters had vanished before the present ruin first took form in stone. St. Hilda's fame pervades the little modern town itself, either in the name of shop or terrace, or wherever on a vender's stall the small, headless fossil ammonites recall the legend of her pious work. Yet with a history that fascinates every reader of Bede, and an acre of soil second to none in sacredness to the lover of English literature, the Whitby of to-day is not precisely as other quaint towns which take their atmosphere from minster or abbey alone, and where the shades that are to be met in the spirit are all cowled or mitred. Within the past decade, the hilly town and even the abbey church itself have gained some fresh memories which the tourist zealous for associations will not be likely to overlook.

The particular local habitation from

which these memories diverge is not to be found in a conspicuous quarter of the fashionable West Cliff, nor even in one of the wide new streets, with cheerful rows of bay-windowed houses, leading inland from the cliff. Instead, the visitor who wishes to find the modest lodgings in which James Russell Lowell spent several weeks of each of his last summers in England, and of the last but one of his life, must turn out of the long main street of the town, where, to the right going cliffward, an opening, not far from the top of the hill, leads by the length of a few dozen yards into a short, narrow street. Facing the approach through the opening is a stable, with its yard on the left. Opposite the stableyard stands the house in question. The situation and the first view of the diminutive row, or "terrace," of which the house is a part, combine to make one of those unpleasantly chilling impressions to which the heated imagination of an ardent sightseer may be especially suscep

tible. To dissipate the chill, it is only necessary to take note of the inoffensiveness of the details which have caused it. The stable-yard, with its compact wall and round stone well in the middle, no less than the back yards of the lodginghouses that flank it on the left, is kept in scrupulous English trimness and neat