people’s power again through feudalism. The whole face of Europe is altered. Very good; the face of architecture alters with it. Like civilization, she has turned a page, and the new spirit of the times finds her prepared to write to his dictation. She has brought home with her from the crusades the pointed arch, as the nations have brought free thought. Henceforward, as Rome is gradually dismembered, so the Romanesque architecture dies out. The hieroglyphic deserts the Cathedral, and goes to assist heraldry in heightening the prestige of feudalism. The Cathedral itself, once so imbued with dogma, invaded now by the commonalty, by the spirit of freedom, escapes from the priest, and falls under the dominion of the artist. The artist fashions it after his own good pleasure. Farewell to mystery, to myth, to rule. Here fantasy and caprice are a law unto themselves. Provided the priest has his basilica and his altar, he has nothing further to say in the matter. The four walls belong to the artist. The stone book belongs no more to the priest, to religion, to Rome, but to imagination, to poetry, to the people. From thenceforward occur these rapid and innumerable transformations of an architecture only lasting three centuries, so striking after the six or seven centuries of stagnant immobility of the Romanesque style. Meanwhile, Art marches on with giant strides, and popular originality plays what was formerly the Bishop’s part. Each generation in passing inscribes its line in the book; it rubs out the ancient Roman hieroglyphics from the frontispiece—hardly that one sees here and there some dogma glimmering faintly through the new symbol overlying it. The framework of religion is scarcely perceptible through this new drapery. One can scarcely grasp the extent of the license practised at that time by the architects, even on the churches. Such are the shamelessly intertwined groups of monks and nuns on the capitals of the Gallery of Chimney-Pieces in the Palais de Justice; the episode out of the history of Noah sculptured “to the letter” over the Cathedral door at Bourges; the bacchic monk, with ass’s ears and glass in hand, grinning in the face of a whole congregation, carved on a stone basin of the Abbey of Bocherville. For the thought written in stone there existed at that period a privilege perfectly comparable to the present liberty of the press. It was the liberty of architecture.

And the liberty went far. At times a door, a façade, nay, even an entire church, presents a symbolical meaning wholly unconnected with worship, even inimical to the Church itself. In the thirteenth century, Guillaume of Paris, and in the fifteenth, Nicolas Flamel wrote such seditious pages. Saint-Jacques-de- la-Boucherie was a complete volume of opposition.

This was the only form, however, in which free thought was possible, and therefore found full expression only in those books called edifices. Under that form it might have looked on at its own burning at the hands of the common hangman had it been so imprudent as to venture into manuscript: the thought embodied in the church door would have assisted at the death agony of the thought expressed in the book. Therefore, having but this one outlet, it rushed towards it from all parts; and hence the countless mass of Cathedrals spread over all Europe, a number so prodigious that it seems incredible, even after verifying it with one’s own eyes. All the material, all the intellectual forces of society, converged to that one point—architecture. In this way, under the pretext of building churches to the glory of God, the art developed to magnificent proportions.

In those days, he who was born a poet became an architect. All the genius scattered among the masses and crushed down on every side under feudalism, as under a testudo of brazen bucklers, finding no outlet but in architecture, escaped by way of that art, and its epics found voice in cathedrals. All other arts obeyed and put themselves at the service of the one. They were the artisans of the great work; the architect summed up in his own person, sculpture, which carved his façade; painting, which dyed his windows in glowing colours; music, which set his bells in motion and breathed in his organ pipes. Even poor Poetry—properly so called, who still persisted in eking out a meagre existence in manuscript—was obliged, if she was to be recognised at all, to enroll herself in the service of the edifice, either as hymn or prosody; the small part played, after all, by the tragedies of æschylus in the sacerdotal festivals of Greece, and the Book of Genesis in the Temple of Solomon.

Thus, till Gutenberg’s time, architecture is the chief, the universal form of writing; in this stone book, begun by the East, continued by Ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages have written the last page. For the rest, this phenomenon of an architecture belonging to the people succeeding an architecture belonging