in any way
to argue against other beginnings, whenever they can be
proved. I have said before that most decorations have a
mixed ancestry. But when I see single or clustered
columns starting from the ground--spreading at the base
like the gnarled root, and growing till they culminate
in crowns of foliage, forming symmetrical capitals, like
the first clusters of leaves on a strong young
sapling--then the branches spreading and interlacing,
only checked at equal intervals by a lovely leaf or
burgeon, till they meet in blossoms on the highest point
of the arch,--I cannot but adhere to the old idea that
rows of trees meeting overhead suggested Gothic ornament
as well as Gothic Architecture. The Spanish or Moresque
Gothic was overloaded with leaves and flowers, and the
German Gothic was enriched with fantastic trees and
flowers, each according to its national taste and
fashion. A Gothic tree is a very conventional plant; and
generally carries only one leaf on each branch. I have
given a specimen of archaic trees from the Bayeux
tapestry. They are typical of the Gothic botanical idea
and style down to the fourteenth century. (Fig. 13.)

Nor is this interpretation of Gothic design other than a
result of its descent from the Egyptian ancestral
motive, where the temple columns represented the single
stem of the lotus with one large blossom for its
capital, or else a bundle of stems of the lotus, palm,
and convolvulus flowering together into a beautiful
cluster. Even the gigantic columns of the great
hypaethral hall at Karnac are only a stupendous
exaggeration of the same stalk and flower motive. From
these were derived the forms of the early Greek
column--soon enriched by substituting the Acanthus for
the Lotus, but often retaining the convolvulus.

[94] 1 Kings x.; Ezek. xxvii. 10, 11. See Stanley's
"Lectures on the Jewish Church."

[95] Layard's "Nineveh and its Remains," vol. ii. p.
388; Rawlinson's "Ancient Monarchies," vol. ii. p. 2.

CHAPTER III.

PATTERNS.

In the last chapter on design I have described patterns as the
examples or illustrations of the art of decoration, and as being the
records of the motives which produced them in different eras. My
present object is to class and define patterns as decorative art.

It is argued by some archaeologists th