CONSTRUCTION XVII. FILLING OF APERTURE 227

passing from experiment on the one side, to affectation on the other; and it was so far from ever becoming systematised, that I am aware of no type of tracery for which a less decided preference is shown in the buildings in which it exists. The early pierced traceries are multitudinous and perfect in their kind,-the late Flamboyant, luxuriant in detail, and lavish in quantity,-but the perfect forms exist in comparatively few churches, generally in portions of the church only; and are always connected, and that closely, either with the massy forms out of which they have emerged, or with the enervated types into which they are instantly to degenerate.

§ 13. Nor indeed are we to look upon them as in all points superior to the more ancient examples. We have above conducted our reasoning entirely on the supposition that a single aperture is given, which it is the object to fill with glass, diminishing the power of the light as little as possible. But there are many cases, as in triforium and cloister lights, in which glazing is not required; in which, therefore, the bars, if there be any, must have some more important function than that of merely holding glass, and in which their actual use is to give steadiness and tone, as it were, to the arches and walls above and beside them; or to give the idea of protection to those who pass along the triforium, and of seclusion to those who walk in the cloister. Much thicker shafts, and more massy arches, may be properly employed in work of this kind; and many groups of such tracery will be found resolvable into true colonnades, with the arches in pairs, or in triple or quadruple groups, and with small rosettes pierced above them for light. All this is just as right in its place, as the glass tracery is in its own function, and often much more grand. But the same indulgence is not to be shown to the affectations which succeeded the developed forms. Of these there are three principal conditions:¹ the Flamboyant of France, the Stump tracery of Germany, and the Perpendicular of England.

¹ [For general references to the first of these conditions of “affectation” (the French Flamboyant), see above, ch. viii. § 30, p. 134, and compare Seven Lamps, ch. ii. § 24 and n. (Vol. VIII. p. 92). For Ruskin’s dislike of the English Perpendicular, see

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