VI. (Fig. 10., Fig. 9.)]

21. From this form to the true spire the change is slight, and consists
in little more than various decoration; generally in putting small
pinnacles at the angles, and piercing the central pyramid with traceried
windows; sometimes, as at Fribourg and Burgos, throwing it into tracery
altogether: but to do this is invariably the sign of a vicious style, as
it takes away from the spire its character of a true roof, and turns it
nearly into an ornamental excrescence. At Antwerp and Brussels, the
celebrated towers (one, observe, ecclesiastical, being the tower of the
cathedral, and the other secular), are formed by successions of
diminishing towers, set one above the other, and each supported by
buttresses thrown to the angles of the one beneath. At the English
cathedrals of Lichfield and Salisbury, the spire is seen in great
purity, only decorated by sculpture; but I am aware of no example so
striking in its entire simplicity as that of the towers of the cathedral
of Coutances in Normandy. There is a dispute between French and English
antiquaries as to the date of the building, the English being unwilling
to admit its complete priority to all their own Gothic. I have no doubt
of this priority myself; and I hope that the time will soon come when
men will cease to confound vanity with patriotism, and will think the
honor of their nation more advanced by their own sincerity and courtesy,
than by claims, however learnedly contested, to the invention of
pinnacles and arches. I believe the French nation was, in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, the greatest in the world; and that the French
not only invented Gothic architecture, but carried it to a perfection
which no other nation has approached, then or since: but, however this
may be, there can be no doubt that the towers of Coutances, if not the
earliest, are among the very earliest, examples of the fully developed
spire. I have drawn one of them carefully for you (_fig._ 11), and you
will see immediately that they are literally domestic roofs, with garret
windows, executed on a large scale, and in stone. Their only ornament is
a kind of scaly mail, which is nothing more than the copying in stone of
the common wooden shingles of the house-roof; and their security is
provided for by strong gabled dormer windows, of massy masonry, which,
though supported on detached shafts, have weight enough completely to
balance the lateral thrusts of the spires.