of gables and pediments),
rather than not have had them; but the natural position of the pinnacle
is, of course, where it adds to, rather than diminishes, the stability
of the building; that is to say, on its main wall piers and the vertical
piers at the buttresses. And thus the edifice is surrounded at last by a
complete company of detached piers and pinnacles, each sustaining an
inclined prop against the central wall, and looking something like a
band of giants holding it up with the butts of their lances. This
arrangement would imply the loss of an enormous space of ground, but the
intervals of the buttresses are usually walled in below, and form minor
chapels.

[Illustration: Fig. XLII.]

Sec. IX. The science of this arrangement has made it the subject of
much enthusiastic declamation among the Gothic architects, almost as
unreasonable, in some respects, as the declamation of the Renaissance
architects respecting Greek structure. The fact is, that the whole
northern buttress system is based on the grand requirement of tall
windows and vast masses of light at the end of the apse. In order to
gain this quantity of light, the piers between the windows are
diminished in thickness until they are far too weak to bear the roof,
and then sustained by external buttresses. In the Italian method the
light is rather dreaded than desired, and the wall is made wide enough
between the windows to bear the roof, and so left. In fact, the simplest
expression of the difference in the systems is, that a northern apse is
a southern one with its inter-fenestrial piers set edgeways. Thus, _a_,
Fig. XLII., is the general idea of the southern apse; take it to pieces,
and set all its piers edgeways, as at _b_, and you have the northern
one. You gain much light for the interior, but you cut the exterior to
pieces, and instead of a bold rounded or polygonal surface, ready for
any kind of decoration, you have a series of dark and damp cells, which
no device that I have yet seen has succeeded in decorating in a
perfectly satisfactory manner. If the system be farther carried, and a
second or third order of buttresses be added, the real fact is that we
have a building standing on two or three rows of concentric piers, with
the _roof off_ the whole of it except the central circle, and only ribs
left, to carry the weight of the bit of remaining roof in the middle;
and after the eye has been accustomed to the bold and simple rounding of
the Italian