above are capitals
projecting in one direction only.

Sec. XXVIII. The reader is now master of all he need know respecting
construction of capitals; and from what has been laid before him, must
assuredly feel that there can never be any new system of architectural
forms invented; but that all vertical support must be, to the end of
time, best obtained by shafts and capitals. It has been so obtained by
nearly every nation of builders, with more or less refinement in the
management of the details; and the later Gothic builders of the North
stand almost alone in their effort to dispense with the natural
development of the shaft, and banish the capital from their
compositions.

They were gradually led into this error through a series of steps which
it is not here our business to trace. But they may be generalised in a
few words.

Sec. XXIX. All classical architecture, and the Romanesque which is
legitimately descended from it, is composed of bold independent shafts,
plain or fluted, with bold detached capitals, forming arcades or
colonnades where they are needed; and of walls whose apertures are
surrounded by courses of parallel lines called mouldings, which are
continuous round the apertures, and have neither shafts nor capitals.
The shaft system and moulding system are entirely separate.

The Gothic architects confounded the two. They clustered the shafts till
they looked like a group of mouldings. They shod and capitaled the
mouldings till they looked like a group of shafts. So that a pier became
merely the side of a door or window rolled up, and the side of the
window a pier unrolled (vide last Chapter, Sec. XXX.), both being composed
of a series of small shafts, each with base and capital. The architect
seemed to have whole mats of shafts at his disposal, like the rush mats
which one puts under cream cheese. If he wanted a great pier he rolled
up the mat; if he wanted the side of a door he spread out the mat: and
now the reader has to add to the other distinctions between the Egyptian
and the Gothic shaft, already noted in Sec. XXVI. of Chap. VIII., this
one more--the most important of all--that while the Egyptian rush cluster
has only one massive capital altogether, the Gothic rush mat has a
separate tiny capital to every several rush.

Sec. XXX. The mats were gradually made of finer rushes, until it became
troublesome to give each rush its capital. In fact, when the groups of
shafts became excessively complicat