un in 1842, but issued only
in 1848. "Legends of the Monastic Orders" followed in 1850; "Legends of
the Madonna" in 1852; and the "History of Our Lord" (completed by Lady
Eastlake) in 1860. Mrs. Jameson had an imperfect knowledge of technique,
and her work was descriptive rather than critical. But it probably did
more to enlist the interest of the general reader in Christian art than
Lord Lindsay's more learned volumes; or possibly even than the brilliant
but puzzling rhetoric of Ruskin.

With Pugin's "Contrasts" began the "Battle of the Styles." This was soon
decided in Pugin's favour, so far as ecclesiastical buildings were
concerned. Fergusson, who is hostile to Gothic, admits that wherever
clerical influence extended, the style came into fashion. The Cambridge
Camden Society was founded in 1839 for the study of church architecture
and ritual, and issued the first number of its magazine, _The
Ecclesiologist_, in 1841. But the first national triumph for secular
Gothic was won when Barry's design for the new houses of Parliament was
selected from among ninety-seven competing plans. The corner-stone was
laid at Westminster in 1840, and much of the detail, as the work went on,
was furnished by Pugin.

It was not long before the Gothic revival found an ally in the same great
writer who had already come forward as the champion of Pre-Raphaelite
painting. The masterly analysis of "The Nature of Gothic" in "The Stones
of Venice" (vol. i., 1851; vols. ii. and iii., 1853), and the eloquence
and beauty of a hundred passages throughout the three volumes, fascinated
a public which cared little about art, but knew good literature when they
saw it. Eastlake testifies that Ruskin had some practical influence on
English building. Young artists went to Venice to study the remains of
Italian Gothic, and the results of their studies were seen in the surface
treatment of many London facades, especially in the cusped window arches,
and in the stripes of coloured bricks which give a zebra-like appearance
to the architecture of the period. But, in general, working architects
were rather contemptuous of Ruskin's fine-spun theories, which they
ridiculed as fantastic, self-contradictory, and super-subtle; rhetoric or
metaphysics, in short, and not helpful art criticism.

Ruskin's adhesion to Gothic was without compromise. It was "not only the
best, but the _only rational_ architecture." "I plead for the
introduction of the Goth