134 THE STONES OF VENICE CONSTRUCTION

sections, as described in the Seven Lamps.¹ I have only here given one example of this family, an unimportant but sufficiently characteristic one (16), from St. Gervais of Falaise. One side of the nave of that church is Norman, the other Flamboyant, and the two piers 14 and 16 stand opposite each other. It would be useless to endeavour to trace farther the fantasticism of the later Gothic shafts; they become mere aggregations of mouldings very sharply and finely cut, their bases at the same time running together in strange complexity, and their capitals diminishing and disappearing. Some of their conditions, which, in their rich striation, resemble crystals of beryl, are very massy and grand; others, meagre, harsh, or effeminate in themselves, are redeemed by richness and boldness of decoration; and I have long had it in my mind to reason out the entire harmony of this French Flamboyant system, and fix its types and possible power.² But this inquiry is foreign altogether to our present purpose, and we shall therefore turn back from the Flamboyant to the Norman side of the Falaise aisle, resolute for the future that all shafts of which we may have the ordering, shall be permitted, as with wisdom we may also permit men or cities, to gather themselves into companies, or constellate themselves into clusters, but not to fuse themselves into mere masses of nebulous aggregation.

¹ [See ch. ii. §§ 27, 28, Vol. VIII. pp. 94-98.]

² [An intention partly fulfilled in a lecture at the Royal Institution in 1869 on “The Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme”; the lecture is printed for the first time in a later volume of this edition; an annotated catalogue of drawings and sketches exhibited to illustrate the lecture was published at the time.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]