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There is a rich variety of choice in the luxuriantly floral Gothic, the cold serene classic, and that prolific style combining both, which a popular writer on the Æsthetics of Art has stigmatised by the term "sensual," ordering all his votaries to abjure it accordingly.
And Paris was the city, too, of the old culture, the city of Julian the Apostate, the city of the middle ages, that Victor Hugo had portrayed in Notre Dame de Paris the first book I had read in French, difficult though it was with its many peculiar expressions for Gothic arches and buttresses and it was the city where Alfred de Musset had written his poems and where Delacroix had painted.
No Gothic scourge of God, no Vandal pest of nations, no fabled fugitive from the flames of Troy, no bastard Norman tyrant, appears among the list of worthies who first landed on the rock, which your veneration has preserved as a lasting monument of their achievement.
At the top runs a frieze of most elaborate hammered and pierced work early renaissance in detail in the centre, Gothic in the side arches, above which comes in the centre a wonderful cresting. In the middle, over the gate which rises as high as the top of the cresting, is a large trefoil made of a flat hammered band intertwined with a similar band after the manner of a Manoelino doorway.
Indeed, the Gothic tapestries more than any other existing pictures take us back to that epoch of our lives when we lived in romance, when the Sleeping Beauty hid in just such towers, when the prince rode such a horse and appeared an elegant young knight.
If a large park surrounded the castle, it would stand out more prominently, and the beauty and magnificence of its architecture would be better shown. There is, indeed, a well laid out garden, but it is yet new and not very extensive. The castle is built in the Gothic style, and is full of towers, pinnacles, and buttresses, such as are seen in similar well preserved buildings of olden time.
Sir James was at that time engaged in writing his well-known essay "On the Origin of Gothic Architecture," and in this my father was of important use to him. He executed the greater number of the illustrations for this beautiful work. The book when published had a considerable influence in restoring the taste of architects to a style which they had heretofore either neglected or degraded.
At the royal summons, the dukes and counts, the bishops and nobles of the Gothic monarchy, assembled at the head of their followers; and the title of King of the Romans, which is employed by an Arabic historian, may be excused by the close affinity of language, religion, and manners, between the nations of Spain.
At the top are plain Gothic pinnacles; behind which rises the enclosing arch, due doubtless to the restoration after the earthquake. The gable-shaped moulding runs from the base of these pinnacles to the top of the ogee, and forms the boundary between the stonework and the plaster.
In the centre of the hamlet stood the parish church, and its little Gothic tower, from which at present was heard the Sunday chime of bells.
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