nce their decoration into invisibility. Walk
through your streets, and try to make out the ornaments on the upper
parts of your fine buildings--(there are none at the bottoms of them).
Don't do it long, or you will all come home with inflamed eyes, but you
will soon discover that you can see nothing but confusion in ornaments
that have cost you ten or twelve shillings a foot.

[Illustration: PLATE VIII. (Fig. 13., Fig. 14.)]

37. Now, the Gothic builders placed their decoration on a precisely
contrary principle, and on the only rational principle. All their best
and most delicate work they put on the foundation of the building, close
to the spectator, and on the upper parts of the walls they put ornaments
large, bold, and capable of being plainly seen at the necessary
distance. A single example will enable you to understand this method of
adaptation perfectly. The lower part of the facade of the cathedral of
Lyons, built either late in the thirteenth or early in the fourteenth
century, is decorated with a series of niches, filled by statues of
considerable size, which are supported upon pedestals within about eight
feet of the ground. In general, pedestals of this kind are supported on
some projecting portion of the basement; but at Lyons, owing to other
arrangements of the architecture into which I have no time to enter,
they are merely projecting tablets, or flat-bottomed brackets of stone,
projecting from the wall. Each bracket is about a foot and a half
square, and is shaped thus (_fig._ 13), showing to the spectator, as he
walks beneath, the flat bottom of each bracket, quite in the shade, but
within a couple of feet of the eye, and lighted by the reflected light
from the pavement. The whole of the surface of the wall round the great
entrance is covered with bas-relief, as a matter of course; but the
architect appears to have been jealous of the smallest space which was
well within the range of sight; and the _bottom_ of every bracket is
decorated also--nor that slightly, but decorated with no fewer than _six
figures each, besides a flower border_, in a space, as I said, _not
quite a foot and a half square_. The shape of the field to be decorated
being a kind of quatre-foil, as shown in _fig._ 13, four small figures
are placed, one in each foil, and two larger ones in the center. I had
only time, in passing through the town, to make a drawing of one of the
angles of these pedestals; that sketch I have enlarged, in