oping contemporaneously in
the neighbouring countries.

The Rhine proved itself a veritable borderland, which neither kept to
the strict classicism of the Romanesque manner of building, nor yet
adopted, without question, the newly arisen Gothic of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries.

Architecture and sculpture in its earliest and most approved
ecclesiastical forms undoubtedly made its way from Italy to France,
Spain, Germany, and England, along the natural travel routes over which
came the Roman invaders, conquerors, or civilizers--or whatever we
please to think them.

Under each and every environment it developed, as it were, a new style,
the flat roofs and low arches giving way for the most part to more lofty
and steeper-angled gables and openings. This may have been caused by
climatic influences, or it may not; at any rate, church-building--and
other building as well--changed as it went northward, and sharp gables
and steep sloping lines became not only frequent, but almost universal.

The Comacine Masters, who were the great church-builders of the early
days in Italy, went north in the seventh century, still pursuing their
mission; to England with St. Augustine, to Germany with Boniface, and
Charlemagne himself, as we know, brought them to Aix-la-Chapelle for
the work at his church there.

The distinctly Rhenish variety of Romanesque ecclesiastical architecture
came to its greatest development under the Suabian or Hohenstaufen line
of emperors, reaching its zenith during the reign of the great Frederick
Barbarossa (1152-90).

The churches at Neuss, Bonn, Sinzig, and Coblenz all underwent a
necessary reconstruction in the early thirteenth century because of
ravages during the terrific warfare of the rival claimants to the throne
of Barbarossa.

Frederick, one claimant, was under the guardianship of Pope Innocent
III., and Philip, his brother, was as devotedly cared for by the rival
Pope, Gregory VIII. Finally Innocent compromised the matter by securing
the election of Otho IV., of Brunswick.

With that "hotbed of heresies," Holland, this book has little to do,
dealing only with three centres of religious movement there.

Holland was the storm-centre for a great struggle for religious and
political freedom, and for this very reason there grew up here no great
Gothic fabrics of a rank to rival those of France, England, and
Germany. Still, there was a distinct and most picturesque element which
entered int