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Theodomir waited with some anxiety, not knowing how the victor would regard this stratagem. Abdul might well have viewed with anger the capitulation of an army of women and dotards, but he had a sense of humor and a generous heart, and the smile of amusement on his face told the Gothic chief that he was fully forgiven for his shrewd stratagem.
Richly gilded, with fine paintings on the panels, with delicate Gothic pinnacles and tabernacle work, they and the metal screens which half hide them do much to make Spanish churches the most interesting in the world. Unfortunately in Portugal the bad taste of the eighteenth century has replaced all those that may have existed by great and heavy erections of elaborately carved wood.
It is purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effect that permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistency and strength. And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, above all, this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctly Gothic than their surroundings.
In effect, he breathes; in thus passing from the former to the latter spectacle, he finds real intellectual pleasure; his eyes, offended with Gothic disorder, turn with relief and satisfaction to majestic simplicity and classic regularity; his eyes are those of a Latin architect brought up in the "Ecole de Rome." This is so true that, outside of this style, he admits of no other.
Above this entablature the shafts are carried up square for some way, and end in Gothic pinnacles. Between them is a niche surmounted by a large half-Gothic canopy and united to the side shafts by a broken and twisted treelike moulding. What adds to the strangeness of this door is that the blank spaces are plastered and whitewashed, while all the rest of the church is of grey granite.
The deep moat was still extant, although now devoted to trees and vegetables. His vehicle, after it had passed under the dark Gothic gate, moved along somewhat heavily on the rough stone pavement, and finally drew up in front of a comfortable-looking house, on the threshold of which the Pastor was standing ready to receive him.
The toilet of her Highness announced an immense progress in the elegance of civilization beyond the Rhine; for, renouncing the Gothic hoops, the princess had adopted the very latest fashions, and, though nearly seventy years of age, wore a dress of black lace over red satin, and her coiffure consisted of a white muslin veil, fastened by a wreath of roses, in the style of the vestals of the opera.
No architectural beauty distinguished the residence of the Earls of Buchan; none of that tasteful decoration peculiar to the Saxon, nor of the more sombre yet more imposing style introduced by the Norman, and known as the Gothic architecture.
This architecture, anterior to the Christian era, may be broadly divided into three great periods, during which it was successively practiced by three peoples: the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans. Then intervened the Dark Ages, and a new art arose, the Gothic, which was a flowering out in stone of the spirit of Christianity.
The contending forces met on the plains of Champagne, and at Chalons was fought the decisive battle by which Europe was delivered from Asia, and the Gothic nations from the Mongol races, A.D. 451. Attila was beaten, and Gaul was saved from Sclavonic invaders. It is said that three hundred thousand of the barbarians, on both sides, were slain.
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