a land where the heights of its own native style are so exalted.

Gothic, regardless of the fact as to whether it be the severe and
unornamental varieties of the Low Countries or the exaggerations of the
most ornately flamboyant style, appears not only to please the casual
and average observer, but the thorough student of ecclesiastical
architecture as well. It has come to be the accepted form throughout the
world of what is best representative of the thought and purpose for
which a great church should stand.

With the Renaissance we have not a little to do, when considering the
cathedrals of France. Seldom, if ever, in the sixteenth century did the
builder or even the restorer add aught but Italian accessories where any
considerable work was to be accomplished. Why, or how, the Renaissance
ever came into being it is quite impossible for any one to say, _sans
doubt_, as is the first rudimentary invention of Gothic itself. Perhaps
it was but the outcome of a desire for something different, if not new;
but in the process the taste of the people fell to a low degree.
Architecture may be said to have been all but divorced from life, and,
while the fabric is a dead thing of itself, it is a very living and
human expression of the tendencies of an era. The Renaissance sought to
revive painting and sculpture and to incorporate them into architectural
forms. Whether after a satisfactory manner or not appears to have been
no concern with the revivers of a style which was entirely unsuited in
its original form to a northern latitude. That which answered for the
needs and desires of a southern race could not be boldly transplanted
into another environment and live without undergoing an evolution which
takes time, a fact not disproven by later events.

The Italians themselves were the undoubted cause of the debasement of
the classical style, evidences having crept into that country nearly a
hundred years before the least vestiges were known in either France or
Germany, the Netherlands, or England, and which, though traceable, had
left but slight impress in Spain. It is doubtless not far wrong to
attribute its introduction into France as the outcome of the wanderings
in Italy of Charles VIII., in the latter years of the XV. century. As a
result of this it is popularly supposed that it was introduced into the
domestic architecture of the nobles who had accompanied the king. Here
it found perhaps its most satisfying expression; in tho