ome important respect
from every other; and many include features which, if they occurred in
other buildings, would not be considered Gothic at all; so that all we
have to reason upon is merely, if I may be allowed so to express it, a
greater or less degree of _Gothicness_ in each building we examine. And
it is this Gothicness,--the character which, according as it is found
more or less in a building, makes it more or less Gothic,--of which I
want to define the nature; and I feel the same kind of difficulty in
doing so which would be encountered by any one who undertook to explain,
for instance, the nature of Redness, without any actual red thing to
point to, but only orange and purple things. Suppose he had only a piece
of heather and a dead oak-leaf to do it with. He might say, the color
which is mixed with the yellow in this oak-leaf, and with the blue in
this heather, would be red, if you had it separate; but it would be
difficult, nevertheless, to make the abstraction perfectly intelligible:
and it is so in a far greater degree to make the abstraction of the
Gothic character intelligible, because that character itself is made up
of many mingled ideas, and can consist only in their union. That is to
say, pointed arches do not constitute Gothic, nor vaulted roofs, nor
flying buttresses, nor grotesque sculptures; but all or some of these
things, and many other things with them, when they come together so as
to have life.

Sec. III. Observe also, that, in the definition proposed, I shall only
endeavor to analyze the idea which I suppose already to exist in the
reader's mind. We all have some notion, most of us a very determined
one, of the meaning of the term Gothic; but I know that many persons
have this idea in their minds without being able to define it: that is
to say, understanding generally that Westminster Abbey is Gothic, and
St. Paul's is not, that Strasburg Cathedral is Gothic, and St. Peter's
is not, they have, nevertheless, no clear notion of what it is that they
recognize in the one or miss in the other, such as would enable them to
say how far the work at Westminster or Strasburg is good and pure of its
kind: still less to say of any non-descript building, like St. James's
Palace or Windsor Castle, how much right Gothic element there is in it,
and how much wanting, And I believe this inquiry to be a pleasant and
profitable one; and that there will be found something more than
usually interesting in tracin