ditions became fantastic and effeminate, but, in
the country where they had been invented, never lost their peculiar
grace until they were replaced by the Renaissance. The copies of the
school in England and Italy have all its faults and none of its
beauties; in France, whatever it lost in method or in majesty, it gained
in fantasy: literally Flamboyant, it breathed away its strength into
the air; but there is not more difference between the commonest doggrel
that ever broke prose into unintelligibility, and the burning mystery of
Coleridge, or spirituality of Elizabeth Barrett, than there is between
the dissolute dulness of English Flamboyant, and the flaming undulations
of the wreathed lines of delicate stone, that confuse themselves with
the clouds of every morning sky that brightens above the valley of the
Seine.

Sec. XV. The second group of traceries, the intersectional or German
group, may be considered as including the entire range of the absurd forms
which were invented in order to display dexterity in stone-cutting and
ingenuity in construction. They express the peculiar character of the
German mind, which cuts the frame of every truth joint from joint, in
order to prove the edge of its instruments; and, in all cases, prefers a
new or a strange thought to a good one, and a subtle thought to a useful
one. The point and value of the German tracery consists principally in
turning the features of good traceries upside down, and cutting them in
two where they are properly continuous. To destroy at once foundation
and membership, and suspend everything in the air, keeping out of sight,
as far as possible, the evidences of a beginning and the probabilities
of an end, are the main objects of German architecture, as of modern
German divinity.

Sec. XVI. This school has, however, at least the merit of ingenuity. Not
so the English Perpendicular, though a very curious school also in _its_
way. In the course of the reasoning which led us to the determination of
the perfect Gothic tracery, we were induced successively to reject
certain methods of arrangement as weak, dangerous, or disagreeable.
Collect all these together, and practise them at once, and you have the
English Perpendicular.

[Illustration: Fig. XLVI.]

As thus. You find, in the first place (Sec. V.), that your tracery bars
are to be subordinated, less to greater; so you take a group of, suppose,
eight, which you make all exactly equal, giving you nine equ