258 THE STONES OF VENICE

to be invested with the same characters of beauty which the designer had discovered in the leaf.¹ Observe, there is a wide difference between these two intentions. The idea that large Gothic structure, in arches and roofs, was intended to imitate vegetation, is, as above noticed, untenable for an instant in the front of facts.² But the Gothic builder perceived that, in the leaves which he copied for his minor decorations, there was a peculiar beauty, arising from certain characters of curvature in outline, and certain methods of subdivision and of radiation in structure. On a small scale, in his sculptures and his missal-painting, he copied the leaf or thorn itself; on a large scale he adopted from it its abstract sources of beauty, and gave the same kind of curvatures and the same species of subdivision to the outline of his arches, so far as was consistent with their strength, never, in any single instance, suggesting the resemblance to leafage by irregularity of outline, but keeping the structure perfectly simple, and, as we have seen, so consistent with the best principles of masonry, that in the finest Gothic designs of arches, which are always single-cusped (the cinquefoiled arch being licentious, though in early work often very lovely), it is literally impossible, without consulting, the context of the building, to say whether the cusps have been added for the sake of beauty or of strength; nor, though in mediĉval architecture they were, I believe, assuredly first employed in mere love of their picturesque form, am I absolutely certain that their earliest invention was not a structural effort. For the earliest cusps with which I am acquainted are those used in the vaults of the great galleries of the Serapeum, discovered in 1850 by M. Mariette³ at Memphis, and described by Colonel Hamilton in a paper read in February last (1853) before the Royal Society of Literature.* The roofs of its galleries were

* See Athenĉum, March 5th, 1853.

¹ [Compare in Vol. XII. Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 14.]

² [See above, § 70, p. 237.]

³ [The great French Egyptologist (1821-1881), from 1858 till his death director of the official excavations in Egypt. His discovery of the temple of Serapis at Sakkâra, on the site of the ancient, first brought him into notice.]

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