a priori_, that, wherever true invention
exists, such ornament will be employed in profusion.

Sec. C. Now, all Gothic may be divided into two vast schools, one early,
the other late;[73] of which the former, noble, inventive, and
progressive, uses the element of foliation moderately, that of floral
and figure sculpture decoration profusely; the latter, ignoble,
uninventive, and declining, uses foliation immoderately, floral and
figure sculpture subordinately. The two schools touch each other at that
instant of momentous change, dwelt upon in the "Seven Lamps," chap, ii.,
a period later or earlier in different districts, but which may be
broadly stated as the middle of the fourteenth century; both styles
being, of course, in their highest excellence at the moment when they
meet, the one ascending to the point of junction, the one declining from
it, but, at first, not in any marked degree, and only showing the
characters which justify its being above called, generically, ignoble,
as its declension reaches steeper slope.

Sec. CI. Of these two great schools, the first uses foliation only in
large and simple masses, and covers the minor members, cusps, &c., of that
foliation, with various sculpture. The latter decorates foliation itself
with minor foliation, and breaks its traceries into endless and
lace-like subdivision of tracery.

A few instances will explain the difference clearly. Fig. 2, Plate XII.,
represents half of an eight-foiled aperture from Salisbury; where the
element of foliation is employed in the larger disposition of the starry
form; but in the decoration of the cusp it has entirely disappeared, and
the ornament is floral.

[Illustration: Plate XII.
LINEAR AND SURFACE GOTHIC.]

But in fig. 1, which is part of a fringe round one of the later windows
in Rouen Cathedral, the foliation is first carried boldly round the
arch, and then each cusp of it divided into other forms of foliation.
The two larger canopies of niches below, figs. 5 and 6, are respectively
those seen at the flanks of the two uppermost examples of gabled Gothic
in Fig. X., p. 213. Those examples were there chosen in order also to
illustrate the distinction in the character of ornamentation which we
are at present examining; and if the reader will look back to them, and
compare their methods of treatment, he will at once be enabled to fix
that distinction clearly in his mind. He will observe that in the
uppermost the ele