ons. The state of the country, too, made it a
more suitable pattern than the Tudor style. France was still a country
of feudal warfare--so was Scotland; and it was necessary in both to
have defence associated with ornament. The chief peculiarity of this
new style was, the quantity of sharp-topped turrets, which form a sort
of crest to the many details of the lower parts of the buildings.
These are not solely ornamental; they succeeded the bastions of the
old square towers, and served the same purpose. Among the secondary
peculiarities of these buildings, may be counted an extremely rich and
profuse ornamentation of the upper parts--probably the only portions
out of the way of mischief. Indeed, the edifice is sometimes a mere
square block for two or three storeys, while it is crowned, as it
were, with a rich group of turrets and minarets, gables, window-tops,
ornamented chimneys, and gilded vanes. In many instances, the great
square block of older days received this fantastic French termination
at a later time--as, for instance, the famous castle of Glammis, in
Strathmore.

It almost appears as if this style, which has its own peculiar
beauties, had been adopted out of a national antagonism to the
contemporary style in England. The Tudor architecture has always a
horizontal tendency, spreading itself out in broad open screens or
wall-plates, diversified by occasional angular eminences--as, for
instance, in the tops of the decorated windows. But in the
Gallo-Scottish style everything tends to the perpendicular, not only
in the long, narrow shapes of the buildings themselves, and their
tall, spiral turrets, but in the many decorations which incrust them.
This decoration has an extremely rich look, from the quantity of
breaks, and the absence of bare wall or long straight lines. Thus, to
save the uniform plainness of the straight gable-line, it is broken
into small gradations called 'crow-steps.' Every one who looks at old
houses in Scotland must be familiar with this feature, and must have
noticed its picturesqueness. It appears to have been derived from the
Flemish houses, where, however, the steps or terraces are much larger,
and not so effective, since, instead of merely breaking and enriching
the line of the gable, they break it up, as it were, into separate
pieces.

The Scottish style has not, indeed, slavishly adopted any foreign
model. It is, as we have remarked, chiefly adopted from the French;
but it has charac