, if only it had been permitted to remain
original. Nor is there any hope of betterment in architecture, or any
art, to-day, until something of the spirit has come back to us which
made each citizen proud of the house he lived in, or of the House of
God he helped to build, until the love of workmanship that built the
old cathedrals has returned.

[Footnote 26: In the matter of this word "Gothic," I am of the opinion
of Renan, who writes: "En Allemagne jusqu'au quatorzieme siecle ce
style s'appela '_opus Francigenum_,' et c'est la le nom qu'il aurait
du garder." If it is too much to expect of future writers that they
will give up the phrase, let them at least follow the advice of Mr
Moore and limit "Gothic" to the French pointed school of the Ile de
France. Our own architecture has already received quite enough
additional labels to prevent confusion.]

Through those doors, which were shut sternly in the face of princes
under the Church's ban, the poor man gladly passed from the hovel that
was his home. Out of the dark twisting streets whose crowded houses
pressed even against the walls of the Cathedral, the humblest citizen
might turn towards the beauty of a building greater and more wonderful
than any that his feudal lord could boast. He found there not merely
the sanctuary, not merely the shrine of all that was holiest in
history or in creed, but the epitome of his own life, the handicrafts
of his various guilds, as at Rouen, the tale of all his humblest
occupations, the mockery of his neighbours' foibles, the lessons of
the horror of sin. For before the end of the thirteenth century, the
handicraftsmen, associated into such guilds as we have seen in Rouen,
had not only won their freedom from arbitrary oppression, but had
secured so large a share in the government of the towns, that within
the next fifty years, the heads of the communes were nearly always the
delegates from the craft-guilds. The zenith of Gothic architecture
coincided with this period of their triumph; its bright, and
glittering, and joyful art spread all over the intelligent world, and
more especially in France; it was not contented with merely
architectural forms in colourless cathedrals, but decorated them with
carvings painted in gay colours, used every space for pictures, drew
upon all literature for its materials. In Dante, Chaucer, and
Petrarch, in the German Niebelungenlied, in the French romances, in
the Icelandic Sagas, in Froissart and the