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throughout all its lanes and streets; and that the architect had often no more idea of producing a peculiarly devotional impression by the richest colour and the most elaborate carving, than the builder of a modern meeting-house has by his white-washed walls and square-cut casements.*

§ 53. Let the reader fix this great fact well in his mind, and then follow out its important corollaries. We attach, in modern days, a kind of sacredness to the pointed arch and the groined roof, because, while we look habitually out of square windows and live under flat ceilings, we meet with the more beautiful forms in the ruins of our abbeys. But when those abbeys were built, the pointed arch was used for every shop door, as well as for that of the cloister, and the feudal baron and freebooter feasted, as the monk sang, under vaulted roofs; not because the vaulting was thought especially appropriate to either the revel or psalm, but because it was then the form in which a strong roof was easiest built. We have destroyed the goodly architecture of our cities; we have substituted one wholly devoid of beauty or meaning; and then we reason respecting the strange effect upon our minds of the fragments which, fortunately, we have left in our churches, as if those churches had always been designed to stand out in strong relief from all the buildings around them, and Gothic architecture had always been, what it is now, a religious language, like Monkish Latin. Most readers know, if they would arouse their knowledge, that this was not so; but they take no pains to reason the matter out: they abandon themselves drowsily to the impression that Gothic is a peculiarly ecclesiastical style; and sometimes, even, that richness in church ornament is a condition or furtherance of the Romish religion. Undoubtedly it has become so in modern times: for there being no beauty

* See the farther notice of this subject in Vol. III. Chap. IV.¹ [of The Stones of Venice.]

¹ [In the “Travellers’ Edition” the above note was omitted and the following substituted:-

“Compare my Oxford lecture (in the inaugural series), on the relation of Art to Religion” [ Lecture ii. in Lectures on Art].

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