state of the case with respect to tower-building in
general, let me follow for a few minutes the changes which occur in the
towers of northern and southern architects.

Many of us are familiar with the ordinary form of the Italian bell-tower
or campanile. From the eighth century to the thirteenth there was little
change in that form:[8] four-square, rising high and without tapering
into the air, story above story, they stood like giants in the quiet
fields beside the piles of the basilica or the Lombardic church, in this
form (_fig._ 9), tiled at the top in a flat gable, with open arches
below, and fewer and fewer arches on each inferior story, down to the
bottom. It is worth while noting the difference in form between these
and the towers built for military service. The latter were built as in
_fig._ 10, projecting vigorously at the top over a series of brackets or
machicolations, with very small windows, and no decoration below. Such
towers as these were attached to every important palace in the cities of
Italy, and stood in great circles--troops of towers--around their
external walls: their ruins still frown along the crests of every
promontory of the Apennines, and are seen from far away in the great
Lombardic plain, from distances of half-a-day's journey, dark against
the amber sky of the horizon. These are of course now built no more, the
changed methods of modern warfare having cast them into entire disuse;
but the belfry or campanile has had a very different influence on
European architecture. Its form in the plains of Italy and South France
being that just shown you, the moment we enter the valleys of the Alps,
where there is snow to be sustained, we find its form of roof altered by
the substitution of a steep gable for a flat one.[9] There are probably
few in the room who have not been in some parts of South Switzerland,
and who do not remember the beautiful effect of the gray mountain
churches, many of them hardly changed since the tenth and eleventh
centuries, whose pointed towers stand up through the green level of the
vines, or crown the jutting rocks that border the valley.

[Footnote 8: There is a good abstract of the forms of the Italian
campanile, by Mr. Papworth, in the Journal of the Archaeological
Institute, March 1850.]

[Footnote 9: The form establishes itself afterwards in the plains, in
sympathy with other Gothic conditions, as in the campanile of St. Mark's
at Venice.]

[Illustration: PLATE