248 THE STONES OF VENICE

everywhere), or in various other ways inconvenient, flat ceilings may be used, and yet the Gothic shall not lose its purity. But in the roof-mask, there can be no necessity nor reason for a change of form: the gable is the best; and if any other-dome, or bulging crown, or whatsoever else-be employed at all, it must be in pure caprice and wilful transgression of law. And wherever, therefore, this is done, the Gothic has lost its character; it is pure Gothic no more.

§ 84. And this last clause of the definition is to be more strongly insisted upon, because it includes multitudes of buildings, especially domestic, which are Gothic in spirit, but which we are not in the habit of embracing in our general conception of Gothic architecture; multitudes of street dwelling-houses and straggling country farm-houses, built with little care for beauty, or observance of Gothic laws in vaults or windows, and yet maintaining their character by the sharp and quaint gables of the roofs. And, for the reason just given, a house is far more Gothic which has square windows, and a boldly gable roof, than one which has pointed arches for the windows, and a domed or flat roof. For it often happened in the best Gothic times, as it must in all times, that it was more easy and convenient to make a window square than pointed: not but that, as above emphatically stated, the richness of church architecture was also found in domestic; and systematically “when the pointed arch was used in the church it was used in the street,”¹ only in all times there were cases in which men could not build as they would, and were obliged to construct their doors or windows in the readiest way; and this readiest way was then, in small work, as it will be to the end of time, to put a flat stone for a lintel, and build the windows as in Fig. 8; and the occurrence of such windows in a building or a street will not un-Gothicize them, so long as the bold gable roof be retained, and the

¹ [See above, ch. iv. § 53, p. 120, and compare in Vol. XII. Lectures on Architecture and Painting, Lecture i.]

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