ith singularly good effect. It
is a work executed under the rule of Armand de Hesse, Archbishop of
Cologne, and Provost of Aix, probably about 1480.

[Illustration: Fig. 53.]

The Gothic, therefore, of the best era, was by no means the stiff and
monotonous style imagined by those who only know its details by the
remains of our own ecclesiastical buildings; not that we infer them to
be without much freedom and beauty occasionally, as in the Percy shrine
at Beverley Minster, or the tomb of Aylmer de Valence, in Westminster
Abbey. But we have fewer domestic buildings of a florid Gothic style
than are to be found abroad, and the artists who designed for that style
delighted in new ideas. It is even visible in the works of their
painters and engravers: thus the tracery over the doorway in Durer's
print of "The Crucifixion," one of his series of the life of the
Virgin, while it conforms to the leading principle of architectural
design, is composed of branches and leaves which flow with a freedom
belonging more to the painter than the architect. Similar instances
abound in old pictures.

[Illustration: Fig. 54.]

The foliation of German work was generally crisp and full of
convolutions in its minor features, though the leading lines were boldly
conceived. We give an example from a panel carved in wood, in the
Cathedral of Stuttgard, a work of the middle of the fifteenth century.
It is almost a return to the old acanthus leaf, and so completes a cycle
of fine art.

Brief as the review has necessarily been of the decorative arts adorning
life throughout the centuries which have passed in rapid succession
before us, they have taught two great facts--the beauty of art as an
adjunct to the most ordinary demands of domesticity, and the value of
the study of the varied arts of past ages as an addition to the
requirements of our own. "Ever changing, ever new," may be the lesson
derived from the investigation of any epoch. How much then may be
obtained from a general review of all! Seroux d'Agincourt deduced a
history of art from its monuments;[41-*] and men of the present day have
the advantage of all that the world has produced brought easily, by aid
of the burin and the printing-press, to their own firesides. We are
evidently less original in idea than our ancestors, from the association
of their labours with our thought; but we may yet live in the hope of
seeing some new and peculiar feature in the progress of modern
decorat