er did, at the arena of your wrestling. But,
granted that you mean to hold your own and put your strength into it, I
have brought you to these grave walls to consult with them as to the
limits they impose upon your working.

And perhaps the most important of all is already observed by your
_being_ here, for it is important that you should visit, whenever
possible, the place where you are to do work; if you are not able to do
this, get all the particulars you can as to aspect and surroundings. And
yet a reservation must be made, even upon all this; for everything
depends upon the way we use it, and if you only have an eye to the
showing off of your work to advantage, treating the church as a mere
frame for your picture, it would be better that your window should
misfit and have to be cut down and altered, or anything else happen to
it that would help to put it back and make it take second place. It is
so hard to explain these things so that they cannot be misconstrued; but
you remember I quoted the windows at St. Philip's, Birmingham, as an
example of noble thought and work carried to the pitch of perfection and
design. But that was in a classic building, with large, plain, single
openings without tracery. Do you think the artist would have let himself
go, in that full and ample way, in a beautiful Gothic building full of
lovely architectural detail? Not so: rather would he have made his
pictures hang lightly and daintily in the air amongst the slender
shafts, as in St. Martin's Church in the same town, at Jesus College and
at All Saints' Church, Cambridge, at Tamworth; and in Lyndhurst, and
many another church where the architecture, to say truth, had but
slender claims to such respect.

* * * * *

In short, you must think of the building first, and make your windows
help it. You must observe its scale and the spacing and proportions of
its style, and place your own work, with whatever new feeling and new
detail may be natural to you, well within those circumscribing bounds.

But here we find ourselves suddenly brought sharp up, face to face with
a most difficult and thorny subject, upon which we have rushed without
knowing it. "Must we observe then" (you say) "the style of the building
into which we put our work, and not have a style of our own that is
native to us?"

"This is contrary to all you have been preaching! The old men did not
so. Did they not add the fancies of their own t