length, and accurately marking
the limits of the assertion I have made. I do not mean that every
dwelling-house of mediaeval cities was as richly adorned and as exquisite
in composition as the fronts of their cathedrals, but that they
presented features of the same kind, often in parts quite as beautiful;
and that the churches were not separated by any change of style from the
buildings round them, as they are now, but were merely more finished and
full examples of a universal style, rising out of the confused streets
of the city as an oak tree does out of an oak copse, not differing in
leafage, but in size and symmetry. Of course the quainter and smaller
forms of turret and window necessary for domestic service, the inferior
materials, often wood instead of stone, and the fancy of the
inhabitants, which had free play in the design, introduced oddnesses,
vulgarities, and variations into house architecture, which were
prevented by the traditions, the wealth, and the skill of the monks and
freemasons; while, on the other hand, conditions of vaulting,
buttressing, and arch and tower building, were necessitated by the mere
size of the cathedral, of which it would be difficult to find examples
elsewhere. But there was nothing more in these features than the
adaptation of mechanical skill to vaster requirements; there was nothing
intended to be, or felt to be, especially ecclesiastical in any of the
forms so developed; and the inhabitants of every village and city, when
they furnished funds for the decoration of their church, desired merely
to adorn the house of God as they adorned their own, only a little more
richly, and with a somewhat graver temper in the subjects of the
carving. Even this last difference is not always clearly discernible:
all manner of ribaldry occurs in the details of the ecclesiastical
buildings of the North, and at the time when the best of them were
built, every man's house was a kind of temple; a figure of the Madonna,
or of Christ, almost always occupied a niche over the principal door,
and the Old Testament histories were curiously interpolated amidst the
grotesques of the brackets and the gables.

Sec. LV. And the reader will now perceive that the question respecting
fitness of church decoration rests in reality on totally different
grounds from those commonly made foundations of argument. So long as our
streets are walled with barren brick, and our eyes rest continually, in
our daily life, on o