ons 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.[59]

Sec. XXXIX. 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 the life of the school. Sometimes the variety is in one
feature, sometimes in another; it may be in the capitals or crockets, in
the niches or the traceries, or in all together, but in some one or
other of the features it will be found always. If the mouldings are
constant, the surface sculpture will change; if the capitals are of a
fixed design, the traceries will change; if the traceries are
monotonous, the capitals will change; and if even, as in some fine
schools, the early English for example, there is the slightest
approximation to an unvarying type of mouldings, capitals, and floral
decoration, the variety is found in the disposition of the masses, and
in the figure sculpture.

Sec. XL. I must now refer for a moment, before we quit the consideration
of this, the second mental element of Gothic, to the opening of the third
chapter of the "Seven Lamps of Architecture," in which the distinction
was drawn (Sec. 2) between man gathering and man governing; between his
acceptance of the sources of delight from nature, and his developement
of authoritative or imaginative power in their arrangement: for the two
mental elements, not only of Gothic, but of all good architecture, which
we have just been examining, belong to it, and are admirable in it,
chiefly as it is, mo