398 THE STONES OF VENICE DECORATION

spandril. It does not reach its completely defined form until the jamb and archivolt have been divided into longitudinal mouldings; and then the tracery is formed by the innermost group of the shafts or fillets, bent into whatever forms or foliations the designer may choose; but this with a delicacy of adaptation which I rather choose to illustrate by particular examples, of which we shall meet with many in the course of our inquiry, than to delay the reader by specifying here. As for the conditions of beauty in the disposition of the tracery bars, I see no hope of dealing with the subject fairly but by devoting, if I can find time, a separate essay to it¹-which, in itself, need not be long, but would involve, before it could be completed, the examination of the whole mass of materials lately collected by the indefatigable industry of the English architects who have devoted their special attention to this subject, and which are of the highest value as illustrating the chronological succession or mechanical structure of tracery, but which, in most cases, touch on their æsthetic merits incidentally only. Of works of this kind, by far the best I have met with is Mr. Edmund Sharpe’s, on Decorated Windows,² which seems to me, as far as a cursory glance can enable me to judge, to exhaust the subject as respects English Gothic; and which may be recommended to the readers who are interested in the subject, as containing a clear and masterly enunciation of the general principles by which the design of tracery has been regulated, from its first development to its final degradation.

¹ [Time was never found, for the essay was not written.]

² [Sharpe (1809-1877), architect, was a Cambridge man, and a pupil of Rickman. The work here referred to is Decorated Windows; a Series of Illustrations of the Window Tracery of the Decorated Style of Ecclesiastical Architecture (1849). Another work by the same author is commended below, see p. 431. In 1851 he abandoned architecture for engineering, and was engaged in railway construction.]

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