ch we
enjoy under the term picturesque: no pleasure is taken anywhere in
modern buildings, and we find all men of true feeling delighting to
escape out of modern cities into natural scenery: hence, as I shall
hereafter show, that peculiar love of landscape, which is
characteristic of the age. It would be well, if, in all other matters,
we were as ready to put up with what we dislike, for the sake of
compliance with established law, as we are in architecture.

How so debased a law ever came to be established, we shall see when we
come to describe the Renaissance schools; here we have only to note, as
the second most essential element of the Gothic spirit, that it broke
through that law wherever it found it in existence; it not only dared,
but delighted in, the infringement of every servile principle; and
invented a series of forms of which the merit was, not merely that they
were new, but that they were _capable of perpetual novelty_. The
pointed arch was not merely a bold variation from the round, but it
admitted of millions of variations in itself; for the proportions of a
pointed arch are changeable to infinity, while a circular arch is
always the same. The grouped shaft was not merely a bold variation from
the single one, but it admitted of millions of variations in its
grouping, and in the proportions resultant from its grouping. The
introduction of tracery was not only a startling change in the
treatment of window lights, but admitted endless changes in the
interlacement of the tracery bars themselves. So that, while in all
living Christian architecture the love of variety exists, the Gothic
schools exhibited that love in culminating energy; and their influence,
wherever it extended itself, may be sooner and farther traced by this
character than by any other; the tendency to the adoption of Gothic
types being always first shown by greater irregularity, and richer
variation in the forms of the architecture it is about to supersede,
long before the appearance of the pointed arch or of any other
recognizable _outward_ sign of the Gothic mind.

We must, however, herein note carefully what distinction there is
between a healthy and a diseased love of change; for as it was in
healthy love of change that the Gothic architecture rose, it was partly
in consequence of diseased love of change that it was destroyed. In
order to understand this clearly, it will be necessary to consider the
different ways in which change and m