nd abuse in architecture. The variety of
the Gothic schools is the more healthy and beautiful, because in many
cases it is entirely unstudied, and results, not from the mere love of
change, but from practical necessities. For in one point of view Gothic
is not only the best, but the _only rational_ architecture, as being
that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble.
Undefined in its slope of roof, height of shaft, breadth of arch, or
disposition of ground plan, it can shrink into a turret, expand into a
hall, coil into a staircase, or spring into a spire, with undegraded
grace and unexhausted energy; and whenever it finds occasion for change
in its form or purpose, it submits to it without the slightest sense of
loss either to its unity or majesty,--subtle and flexible like a fiery
serpent, but ever attentive to the voice of the charmer. And it is one
of the chief virtues of the Gothic builders, that they never suffered
ideas of outside symmetries and consistencies to interfere with the
real use and value of what they did. If they wanted a window, they
opened one; a room, they added one; a buttress, they built one; utterly
regardless of any established conventionalities of external appearance,
knowing (as indeed it always happened) that such daring interruptions
of the formal plan would rather give additional interest to its
symmetry than injure it. So that, in the best times of Gothic, a
useless window would rather have been opened in an unexpected place for
the sake of the surprise, than a useful one forbidden for the sake of
symmetry. Every successive architect, employed upon a great work, built
the pieces he added in his own way, utterly regardless of the style
adopted by his predecessors; and if two towers were raised in nominal
correspondence at the sides of a cathedral front, one was nearly sure
to be different from the other, and in each the style at the top to be
different from the style at the bottom.

These marked variations were, however, only permitted as part of the
great system of perpetual change which ran through every member of
Gothic design, and rendered it as endless a field for the beholder's
inquiry as for the builder's imagination: change, which in the best
schools is subtle and delicate, and rendered more delightful by
intermingling of a noble monotony; in the more barbaric schools is
somewhat fantastic and redundant; but, in all, a necessary and constant
condition of th