e orderly lines of the stone and the kaleidoscopic
decoration of the windows. Architecture loses much of its fancy and its
delicacy, but becomes more logical, more reasonable, and more organic.

In the choir of the minster this change is only half carried out. There
is a much greater emphasis of line than in the nave, and there is less
delicacy of detail; but the vaulting shafts are no more important, and
the window tracery still plays a considerable part in the design. Hence
the choir lacks that air of decision, that extreme lucidity, to be found
in the design of the nave at Winchester. If it were not for the choir
furniture, the stalls, the throne and pulpit, and the altar, this want
of decision in the design would be much more evident than it is. But the
builders of this choir are not therefore to be blamed. They designed it
as a choir, counting, no doubt, on the effect of the furniture, and as a
choir it must be judged. It might have been expected, perhaps, that a
building designed on the lines of the nave, but without the beauty of
detail of an earlier age, would show all the faults of that nave and few
of its beauties. But this is not the case. The architects were certainly
most skilful; they had the immense advantage of seeing the design of the
nave actually carried out, they understood its faults, and by a few
dexterous alterations they produced a "fair copy" of it, avoiding most
of those faults, and keeping all its structural merits.

As in the nave, the triforium is merely the continuation of the
clerestory, the proportions, of the western bays at least, are almost
the same as those of the nave, and the whole is covered again with a
wooden vault, plastered and ribbed to look like stone; and yet that air
of leanness, flatness, and emptiness, the chief fault of the nave, is
almost entirely avoided.

A comparison of the differences in the two designs, and a demonstration
of the small means by which the success of the later one is produced,
must be both interesting and instructive, but, to be fully carried out,
it would require more space than can be given in this book. We must
confine ourselves, therefore, to pointing out some of the more obvious
changes.

The most curious and important, perhaps, is to be found in the treatment
of the triforium. In the earlier bays east of the eastern transept this
treatment is the same in essentials as on the nave. That is to say, the
triforium is on the same plane as the cle