ll and simplicity the original one was conceived.

All that is left or can be seen of this first structure is splendid.
Though built in the second period of the great northern style, it has
none of the lightness of the French churches which were going up
simultaneously, nor even that of Spanish Leon or Toledo. It has heavy
supporting walls and is of the family of the early French with a
magnificently powerful and efficient system of piers and buttresses. It
is not free from a certain Romanesque feeling in its general lines, its
windows, and in many of its details. Though a splendid type of Gothic
construction, this first church is a convincing proof that the nervous,
subtle, fully developed system was foreign to Spanish taste. The
complicated solutions, the intricate planning, were not in accordance
with their temper nor predilections. Rheims may be said to express the
radical temper of its French builders, Burgos, the conservative Spanish.
In Spain, construction and artistic principles did not go hand in hand
in the glorious manner they were wont to in France. Burgos seems much
more emotional than sensitive. Riotous excess and empty display take the
place of restrained and appropriate decoration. The organic dependence
which should exist between sculpture and architecture, so invariably
present in the early French church, is lacking in Burgos. A careful
analysis is interesting. It reveals the fusion of foreign elements, the
severe monastic of the Cistercians and the later sumptuous secular
style, the florid intricacy of the German, the glory of the Romanesque,
the dryness of its revival and the bombast of the Plateresque, all more
or less transformed by what Spaniards could and would do. In its
construction and buttresses, it recalls Sens and Saint-Denis; in its
nave, Chartres; in its vaulting, the Angevine School. The symmetry of
the early plan is fascinating, and Senor Lamperez y Romea's sincere and
beautiful reconstruction must be a faithful reproduction. It makes the
side aisles quite free, the broad transepts to consist of two bays,
while the crossing is carried by piers heavy enough to support an
ordinary vault but not a majestic lantern. Five perfectly formed radial
chapels surround the polygonal ambulatory and are continued towards the
crossing by three rectangular chapels on each side. The vaulting of nave
and transepts is throughout sexpartite; that of the side aisles,
quadripartite. Most of this has, as will