d showing how pleasant "plain-glazing" may be, with
silvery glass and a child-like enjoyment of simple patterning,
unconscious of "high art." But look at the second window on the north
side. What do you see? You see a yellow shield? Exactly. Every one who
looks at that window as he passes at a quick walk must come away
remembering that he had seen a yellow shield. But stop and look at it.
Don't you _like_ it--_I_ do! Why?--well, because it happens to be by
good luck just _right_, and it is a very good lesson of the degree in
which beauty in glass depends on juxtaposition. I had thought of it as a
particularly beautiful bit of glass in quality and colour--but not at
all! it is textureless and rather crude. I had thought of it as old--not
at all: it is probably eighteenth-century. But look what it happens to
be set in--the mixture of agate, silver, greenish and black quarries.
Imagine it by itself without the dull citron crocketting and pale
yellow-stain "sun" and "shafting" of the panel below--without the black
and yellow escutcheon in the light to its right hand--even without the
cutting up and breaking with black lead lines of its own upper half. In
short, you could have it so placed that you would like it no better,
that it would _be_ no better, than the bit of "builder's glazing" in the
top quatrefoil of the next window, which looks like, and I fancy is, of
almost the very same glass, but clumsily mixed, and, fortunately,
_dated_ for our instruction, 1779.

I do not know any place where you can get more study of certain
properties of glass than in the city of York. The cathedral alone is a
mine of wealth. The nave windows are near enough to see all necessary
detail. There is something of every period. And with regard to the nave
and clerestory windows, they have been so mauled and re-leaded that you
need not be in the least afraid of admiring the wrong thing or passing
by the right. You can be quite frank and simple about it all. For
instance, my own favourite window is the fifth from the west on the
south side. The old restorer has coolly slipped down one whole panel
below its proper level in a shower of rose-leaves (which were really,
I believe, originally a pavement), and, frankly, I don't know (and
don't care) whether they are part of his work in the late eighteenth
century or the original glass of the late fourteenth. I rather incline
to think that they came out of some other window and are bits of
fifteenth-cen