121 
given the Aldine classics an imperishable name. Or, again, 
if you meet with an old parchment engrossed in the curious 
black-letter which is known as balloon writing, you can 
form a pretty fair conjecture that it dates back to the time 
of the Edwards. 
But it is in Architecture that we come upon the most 
striking . and important illustrations of the way in which 
each age, going a little beyond the age before, believed in 
its own improvements, and did simply the noblest thing it 
knew. I hesitate to speak of an art of which I know so 
little technically, but even the knowledge that an ordinary 
lover of old buildings attains suffices to illustrate my point, 
and also to show its value. You can trace our architecture, 
from the great Norman builders, who first taught the English 
how really to build, down to the exaggeration of the 16th 
and the debasement of the l7th centuries, by unbroken 
steps, — Norman, Transitional, Lancet, Geometrical, Curvi- 
linear, Perpendicular,-— every one of which opens up new 
studies of interest. 
And even later still, though the architecture of Elizabeth’s 
time is only reckoned of the poorest (and in ecclesiastical 
architecture there is nothing, for the church was too much 
weakened by the Beformation to do much building), yet in 
domestic architecture we have a type of house with many 
and sometimes fantastic gables, and massive mullioned and 
transomed windows, which at any rate stands for itself, 
and is an interesting study in many of our halls and manor 
houses. 
Of course, all these cannot be divided by sharp and un- 
erring lines of date. They cannot be divided, precisely 
because they are the outcome of true growth, and growth 
implies continuous and indivisible processes. But the order 
of growth is wonderfully observed. Sometimes even its 
minuter steps can be apportioned to their special dates with 
a curious exactness. I remember hearing Mr. Edmund 
