in it only
one or two similes or decorations. "Simplicity is its sole ornament."

From Salisbury we went to Wells. The cathedrals of England form the
pages of a vast work in which there is written the history of a paradox
or enigma as marvellous as that of Stonehenge; and it is this--that the
farther back we go, even into a really barbarous age, almost to the time
when Roman culture had died and the mediaeval had not begun, the more
exquisite are the proportions of buildings, the higher their tone, and,
as in the case of Early and Decorated English, the more beautiful their
ornament. That is to say, that exactly in the time when, according to
all our modern teaching and ideas, there should have been _no_
architectural art, it was most admirably developed, while, on the
contrary, in this end of the nineteenth century, when theory, criticism,
learning, and science abound, it is in its lowest and most depraved
state, its highest flights aiming at nothing better than cheap imitation
of old examples. The age which produced the Romanesque architecture,
whether in northern Italy, along the Rhine as the Lombard, or in France
and England as Norman, was extremely barbarous, bloody, and illiterate;
and yet in the noblest and grandest conceptions of architectural art it
surpassed all the genius of this our time as the sun surpasses a star.
While we _know_ that man has advanced, it still remains true that the
history of architecture alone for the past thousand years indicates a
steady retrogression and decay in art, and this constitutes the
stupendous paradox to which I have alluded. But Milton has fully
explained to us that when the devils in hell built the first great temple
or palace--Pandemonium--they achieved the greatest work of architecture
ever seen!

York Cathedral made on me a hundred times deeper and more sympathetic
impression than St. Peter's of Rome. There is a grandeur of unity and a
sense of a single cultus in it which the Renaissance never reached in
anything. Even from the days of Orcagna there is an element of mixed
motives and incoherence in the best of Italian architecture and
sculpture. It requires colour to effect that which Norman or Gothic art
could produce more grandly and impressively with _shade_ alone. It is
the difference between a garden and a forest. This is shown in the
glorious mediaeval _grisaille_ windows, in which such art proves its
absolute perfection. While I was looking at these i