VI. THE NATURE OF GOTHIC 259

admirably shown in Colonel Hamilton’s drawings made to scale upon the spot, and their profile is a cusped round arch, perfectly pure and simple; but whether thrown into this form for the sake of strength or of grace, I am unable to say.

§ 96. It is evident, however, that the structural advantage of the cusp is available only in the case of arches on a comparatively small scale. If the arch becomes very large, the projections under the flanks must become too ponderous to be secure; the suspended weight of stone would be liable to break off, and such arches are therefore never constructed with heavy cusps, but rendered secure by general mass of masonry; and what additional appearance of support may be thought necessary (sometimes a considerable degree of actual support) is given by means of tracery.

§ 97. Of what I stated in the second chapter of the Seven Lamps respecting the nature of tracery,¹ I need repeat here only this much, that it began in the use of penetrations through the stonework of windows or walls, cut into forms which looked like stars when seen from within, and like leaves when seen from without; the name foil or feuille being universally applied to the separate lobes of their extremities, and the pleasure received from them being the same as that which we feel in the triple, quadruple, or other radiated leaves of vegetation, joined with the perception of a severely geometrical order and symmetry. A few of the most common forms are represented, unconfused by exterior mouldings, in Fig. 18, and the best traceries are nothing more than close clusters of such forms, with mouldings following their outlines.

§ 98. The term “foliated,” therefore, is equally descriptive of the most perfect conditions both of the simple arch and of the traceries by which in later Gothic it is filled; and this foliation is an essential character of the style. No Gothic is either good or characteristic, which is not foliated either in its arches or apertures. Sometimes the bearing arches are foliated, and the ornamentation above composed of

¹ [See Vol. VIII. p. 88.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]