Of the degree of precision with which Nicholas of Pisa and his son adjusted their stones, you may judge by this rough sketch of a piece of St. Mary's of the Thorn, in which the design is of panels enclosing very delicately sculptured heads; and one would naturally suppose that the enclosing panels would be made of jointed pieces, and the heads carved separately and inserted. But the Pisans would have considered that unsafe masonry,—liable to the accident of the heads being dropped out, or taken away. John of Pisa did indeed use such masonry, of necessity, in his fountain; and the bas-reliefs have been taken away. But here one great block of marble forms part of two panels, and the mouldings and head are both carved in the solid, the joint running just behind the neck.

168. Such masonry is, indeed, supposing there were no fear of thieves, gratuitously precise in a case of this kind, in which the ornamentation is in separate masses, and might be separately carved. But when the ornamentation is current, and flows or climbs along the stone in the manner of waves or plants, the concealment of the joints of the pieces of marble becomes altogether essential. And here we enter upon a most curious group of associated characters in Gothic as opposed to Greek architecture.

169. If you have been able to read the article to which I referred you, 'Meneau,' in M. Violet le Duc's dictionary, you know that one great condition of the perfect Gothic structure is that the stones shall be 'en de-lit,' set up on end. The ornament then, which on the reposing or couchant stone was current only, on the erected stone begins to climb also, and becomes, in the most heraldic sense of the term, rampant.

In the heraldic sense, I say, as distinguished from the still wider original sense of advancing with a stealthy, creeping, or clinging motion, as a serpent on the ground, and a cat, or a vine, up a tree-stem. And there is one of these reptile, creeping, or rampant things, which is the first whose action was translated into marble, and otherwise is of boundless importance in the arts and labours of man.

170. You recollect Kingsley's expression,—now hackneyed, because admired for its precision,—the 'crawling foam,' of waves advancing on sand. Tennyson has somewhere also used, with equal truth, the epithet 'climbing' of the spray of breakers against vertical rock. {1} In either instance, the sea action is literally 'rampant'; and the course of a great breaker, whether in its first proud likeness to a rearing horse, or in the humble and subdued gaining of the outmost verge of its foam on the sand, or the intermediate spiral whorl which gathers into a lustrous precision, like that of a polished shell, the grasping force of a giant, you have the most vivid sight and embodiment of literally rampant energy; which the Greeks expressed in their symbolic Poseidon, Scylla, and sea-horse, by the head and crest of the man, dog, or horse, with the body of the serpent; and of which you will find the slower image, in vegetation, rendered both by the spiral tendrils of grasping or climbing plants, and the perennial gaining of the foam or the lichen upon barren shores of stone.

{Footnote: Perhaps I am thinking of Lowell, not Tennyson; I have not time to look.}

171. If you will look to the thirtieth chapter of vol. i. in the new edition of the "Stones of Venice," which, by the gift of its publishers, I am enabled to lay on your table to be placed in your library, you will find one of my first and most eager statements of the necessity of inequality or change in form, made against the common misunderstanding of Greek symmetry, and illustrated by a woodcut of the spiral ornament on the treasury of Atreus at Mycenae. All that is said in that chapter respecting nature and the ideal, I now beg most earnestly to recommend and ratify to you; but although, even at that time, I knew more of Greek art than my antagonists, my broken reading has given me no conception of the range of its symbolic power, nor of the function of that more or less formal spiral line, as expressive, not only of the waves of the sea, but of the zones of the whirlpool, the return of the tempest, and the involution of the labyrinth. And although my readers say that I wrote then better than I write now, I cannot refer you to the passage without asking you to pardon in it what I now hold to be the petulance and vulgarity of expression, disgracing the importance of the truth it contains. A little while ago, without displeasure, you permitted me to delay you by the account of a dispute on a matter of taste between my father and me, in which he was quietly and unavailingly right. It seems to me scarcely a day, since, with boyish conceit, I resisted his wise entreaties that I would re-word this clause; and especially take out of it the description of a sea-wave as "laying a great white tablecloth of foam" all the way to the shore. Now, after an interval of twenty years, I refer you to the passage, repentant and humble as far as regards its style, which people sometimes praised, but with absolue re-assertion of the truth and value of its contents, which people always denied. As natural form is varied, so must beautiful ornament be varied. You are not an artist by reproving nature into deathful sameness, but by animating your copy of her into vital variation. But I thought at that time that only Goths were rightly changeful. I never thought Greeks were. Their reserved variation escaped me, or I thought it accidental. Here, however, is a coin of the finest Greek workmanship, which shows you their mind in this matter unmistakably. Here are the waves of the Adriatic round a knight of Tarentum, and there is no doubt of their variableness.

172. This pattern of sea-wave, or river whirlpool, entirely sacred in the Greek mind, and the {Greek: *bostruchos*} or similarly curling wave in flowing hair, are the two main sources of the spiral form in lambent or rampant decoration. Of such lambent ornament, the most important piece is the crocket, of which I rapidly set before you the origin.

173. Here is a drawing of the gable of the bishop's throne in the upper church at Assisi, of the exact period when the mosaic workers of the thirteenth century at Rome adopted rudely the masonry of the north. Briefly, this is a Greek temple pediment, in which, doubtful of their power to carve figures beautiful enough, they cut a trefoiled hold for ornament, and bordered the edges with harlequinade of mosaic. They then call to their help the Greek sea-waves, and let the surf of the Ægean climb along the slopes, and toss itself at the top into a fleur-de-lys. Every wave is varied in outline and proportionate distance, though cut with a precision of curve like that of the sea itself. From this root we are able—but it must be in a lecture on crockets only—to trace the succeeding changes through the curl of Richard II.'s hair, and the crisp leaves of the forests of Picardy, to the knobbed extravagances of expiring Gothic. But I must to-day let you compare one piece of perfect Gothic work with the perfect Greek.

174. There is no question in my own mind, and, I believe, none in that of any other long-practised student of mediæval art, that in pure structural Gothic the church of St. Urbain at Troyes is without rival in Europe. Here is a rude sketch of its use of the crocket in the spandrils of its external tracery, and here are the waves of the Greek sea round the son of Poseidon. Seventeen hundred years are between them, but the same mind is in both. I wonder how many times seventeen hundred years Mr. Darwin will ask, to retrace the Greek designer of this into his primitive ape; or how many times six hundred years of such improvements as we have made on the church of St. Urbain, will be needed in order to enable our descendants to regard the designers of that, as only primitive apes.