32 PAPERS, ETC. 



I have always greatly admired the skill displayed by the 

 architect in its adoption. The proportions of the Roman- 

 esque church on whose foundations he built forbade any 

 great positive elevation, or any general efFect of lightness. 

 He judiciously threw his whole strength iuto this particular 

 feature, and worked out this wonderful effect of loftiness 

 in the direct side view, to the sacrifice of everything eise. 

 Had the side elevation been cut up into arcade, triforium, 

 and clerestory, or even into arcade and clerestory only, 

 the necessary shortness of the piers w^ould have exiled the 

 notion of height from the only part in which it could take 

 refuge, and have left it no place in the whole building. 

 Indeed the vrhole cathedral is one to which justice has 

 never been done either in an aesthetical or an historical 

 point of view. 



If then we trace up the local Perpendicular to an earlier 

 tradition, carried on through the Early English and Deco- 

 rated churches which I have mentioned, and attaining its 

 complete perfection in the transepts of St. Mary RedclifFe, 

 erected at the very turning point from Flowing to Perpen- 

 dicular, we may easUy understand the peculiar character of 

 its fiilly developed form. The Early style, to a great 

 extent, forestalled the Continuous ; therefore the Con- 

 tinuous, not appearing as something utterly stränge and 

 new, retained a good many of the features of the Early. 



Among these features I reckon the constant use of round, 

 and very frequently of flowered, capitals, the continual oc- 

 currence of the wave-moulding in various positions, and the 

 peculiar and very beautiful variety of Perpendicular tracery 

 so commonly met with, compounded of the Alternate and 

 SupermuUioned forms.* I do not say that none of these 

 features are to be found out of Somersetshire — it occurs 



* See Essay on Window Tracery, p. 191 et seqq. 



