ow it.

[Illustration (f074): Recessed Panel Carved Stone From the Tomb of
Bishop John Morgan D. 1504, St. David's Cathedral.]

There is also a charming corbel of a half-figure of an angel, which,
though somewhat defaced, shows the architectural sense very strongly in
its design--the vertical droop of the wing-feathers inclosing the figure
repeating and continuing the vertical lines of the shafts and the
subsidiary mouldings of the arrangement of the drapery, and its
termination in crisp foliated forms, which pleasantly counterbalance the
set of the scale feathers of the wings and break the semicircular
mouldings of the base of the corbel, repeating those of the shafts
above.

[Illustration (f075): Constructive Line Reechoed in Architectural
Ornament. Corbel, Bishop Vaughan's Chapel, St. David's 1509-]

[Adaptability in Design]

[Illustration (f076): Gothic Tile Pattern S. David's Cath^l.]

Adaptation to spaces upon a flat surface is also illustrated in some
tile patterns from the same place. They are simple and rude but very
effective bits of spacing, and show a thorough grasp of the principles
we have been considering--if, indeed, it is so far conscious work at
all. But whether or not the outcome of a tradition which seemed to be
almost instinctive with mediaeval workmen--a tradition which yet left the
individual free, and under which design was a thing of life and growth,
ever adapting itself to new conditions, and grafting freely new
inventions to flower in fresh phantasy upon the ancient stock--the
movement in art in the Middle Ages, exhibiting as it does a gradual
growth and a constant vitality, always accompanying and adapting itself
to structural changes, to life and habit, was really more analogous to
the development of mechanical science in our own day, where each new
machine is allied to its predecessors, though it supplants them. The one
law being adaptability, the one aim to apply means to ends, and more and
more perfectly, inessentials and superfluities are shed, and invention
triumphs. It is, too, a collective advance, since each engineer, each
inventor, builds upon the experience of both his forerunners and his
fellow-workers, and everything is brought to an immediately practical
test.

We are not yet in the same healthy condition as regards art, and art can
never be on the same plane as science, though art may learn much from
science, chiefly per