an inward angle,
occurring with exquisitely picturesque effect throughout the domestic
architecture of the north, especially Germany and Switzerland; the lower
slope being either an attached external penthouse roof, for protection
of the wall, as in Fig. XXXVII., or else a kind of buttress set on the
angle of the tower; and in either case the roof itself being a simple
gable, continuous beneath it.

[Illustration: Fig. XXXVII.]

Sec. V. The true gable, as it is the simplest and most natural, so I
esteem it the grandest of roofs; whether rising in ridgy darkness, like
a grey slope of slaty mountains, over the precipitous walls of the
northern cathedrals, or stretched in burning breadth above the white and
square-set groups of the southern architecture. But this difference
between its slope in the northern and southern structure is a matter of
far greater importance than is commonly supposed, and it is this to
which I would especially direct the reader's attention.

Sec. VI. One main cause of it, the necessity of throwing off snow in the
north, has been a thousand times alluded to: another I do not remember
having seen noticed, namely, that rooms in a roof are comfortably
habitable in the north, which are painful _sotto piombi_ in Italy; and
that there is in wet climates a natural tendency in all men to live as
high as possible, out of the damp and mist. These two causes, together
with accessible quantities of good timber, have induced in the north a
general steep pitch of gable, which, when rounded or squared above a
tower, becomes a spire or turret; and this feature, worked out with
elaborate decoration, is the key-note of the whole system of aspiration,
so called, which the German critics have so ingeniously and falsely
ascribed to a devotional sentiment pervading the Northern Gothic: I
entirely and boldly deny the whole theory; our cathedrals were for the
most part built by worldly people, who loved the world, and would have
gladly staid in it for ever; whose best hope was the escaping hell,
which they thought to do by building cathedrals, but who had very vague
conceptions of Heaven in general, and very feeble desires respecting
their entrance therein; and the form of the spired cathedral has no more
intentional reference to Heaven, as distinguished from the flattened
slope of the Greek pediment, than the steep gable of a Norman house has,
as distinguished from the flat roof of a Syrian one. We may now, with
ingen