dral front, they would, in their general form, leave deep and
uncomfortable intervals, in which damp would lodge and grass grow; and
there would be a painful feeling in approaching the door in the midst of
a crowd, as if some of them might miss the real doors, and be driven
into the intervals, and embayed there. Clearly it will be a natural and
right expedient, in such cases, to open the walls of the porch wider, so
that they may correspond in slope, or nearly so, with the bevel of the
doorway, and either meet each other in the intervals, or have the said
intervals closed up with an intermediate wall, so that nobody may get
embayed in them. The porches will thus be united, and form one range of
great open gulphs or caverns, ready to receive all comers, and direct
the current of the crowd into the narrower entrances. As the lateral
thrust of the arches is now met by each other, the pinnacles, if there
were any, must be removed, and waterspouts placed between each arch to
discharge the double drainage of the gables. This is the form of all the
noble northern porches, without exception, best represented by that of
Rheims.

Sec. VIII. Contracted conditions of the pinnacle porch are beautifully
used in the doors of the cathedral of Florence; and the entire
arrangement, in its most perfect form, as adapted to window protection and
decoration, is applied by Giotto with inconceivable exquisiteness in the
windows of the campanile; those of the cathedral itself being all of the
same type. Various singular and delightful conditions of it are applied
in Italian domestic architecture (in the Broletto of Monza very
quaintly), being associated with balconies for speaking to the people,
and passing into pulpits. In the north we glaze the sides of such
projections, and they become bow-windows, the shape of roofing being
then nearly immaterial and very fantastic, often a conical cap. All
these conditions of window protection, being for real service, are
endlessly delightful (and I believe the beauty of the balcony, protected
by an open canopy supported by light shafts, never yet to have been
properly worked out). But the Renaissance architects destroyed all of
them, and introduced the magnificent and witty Roman invention of a
model of a Greek pediment, with its cornices of monstrous thickness,
bracketed up above the window. The horizontal cornice of the pediment is
thus useless, and of course, therefore, retained; the protection to the