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moval to its next resting-place, an eager rivalry in building and adornment remained to testify to the historical fact of its former proximity. It has been truly said that “the Cistercian Abbeys in Yorkshire, which are the earliest pure Gothic works in this country, seem to have been the works of the monks. themselves." This fact, which has a special bearing upon our present subject, is, for many reasons, well worth remembering. In these abbeys design and execution were constantly and throughout personal, religious, monastic. Theirs is thus "a beauty wrought out from within." It has in it something of the nature of a growth, something of the mysterious charm and unappraisable value of a spontaneous development.

"Know'st thou what wove yon woodbird's nest

Of leaves and feathers from her breast?

Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,

Painting with morn each annual cell?
Or how the sacred pine-tree adds
To her old leaves now myriads?
Such and so grew these holy piles

Whilst love and terror laid the tiles."

But to "love and terror" at Rievaulx was added

the less solemn but scarcely less potent motive of For what do we find there, and what are

emulation.

the facts?

We find a ruined church consisting entirely of an eastern arm and transepts. Where the

1 Stevenson's House Architecture.

nave should be are grass-grown heaps which cry aloud, and not, it is hoped, in vain, for excavation. The lower part of the transept is clearly Norman, and so, it will probably be found, was the nave. These were part of the older and more truly Cistercian design. But the upper part of the transepts and the whole of the eastern arm are Early English. Some idea of what the old building must have been like may be gathered from the ruins of Kirkstall, where no eastward addition was ever made. The new work at Rievaulx extends to no less than seven bays of rather more than 20 feet each, while the whole church, including transept and nave as well as choir, was not less than 343 feet long. In a word, the Latin cross of the normal Cistercian ground-plan has been entirely lost sight of. No doubt the desire for refinements of ritual, which soon showed itself even among the Cistercians, predisposed the monk-builders to such architectural innovations. Probably, also, they were inspired by the fine proportions of the unreformed Benedictine churches, and urged on by the masonic instinct and impulse. All these motives we shall see at work at Fountains, though with curiously different results. But we can hardly doubt that the temptation which first proved too strong for their traditions of Cistercian Puritanism was the desire to

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