and with statues; or three-quarter columns and statues, were placed against a sloping surface. In this, hollow mouldings are introduced, with a beautiful running foliage, the middle of which is worked in entire relief. The capitals of the piers and shafts are diminished both in number and size; and the shafts themselves form part of the masonry of the piers. This mode of construction is, however, occasionally found in much earlier buildings. There are specimens of this style in Paris, but no good one; and I have not met with any fine building altogether belonging to it.
The fourth style is more arbitrary and fanciful than the others, and less reducible to rule, so that it is difficult to say when it began or ended. Perhaps we should not estimate its full establishment earlier than the fifteenth century; but some buildings of the fourteenth exhibit more or less of the following characteristics. The piers, instead of being composed of a central mass and surrounding shafts, seem to be sometimes bundles of mouldings, with deep hollows between them; sometimes, as in the transept of the cathedral at Beauvais, they present merely an undulating outline, the projecting parts of which have the appearance of ribs, and branch out on the vaulting. The following sketches may serve to explain the general progress of the plans of the piers: in the first style they are sometimes massive cylinders; sometimes as at a. In the second, they are often as at b, but perhaps more frequently have only four attached shafts. The third varies from this towards C, and is at times still more complicated: D and E belong to the fourth style.
I have thought at times that the last mode (E) was adopted from economy. It is posterior in date to the other, and perhaps might be considered as forming a distinct style, but it is not accompanied with such a marked difference in the other parts as to enable me to separate it. The cathedral of St. Wulfram, at Abbeville, offers excellent examples of both sorts of piers. The portal and the five first arches of the nave in that church are the commencements of a most magnificent edifice, with the earlier characters of this fourth style. The remainder is an economical continuation of much inferior architecture, probably of about the year 1500. In the first the piers are formed somewhat in the manner above represented at D, in the other they are as at E; in both, the parts divide, and find their bases at different altitudes; and this peculiarity, and the want of capitals, I consider as the two most distinguishing marks of this style; for the idea of columns being thus lost, the capitals are almost always omitted. This style is also distinguished by more fanciful tracery, by mouldings interlacing with each other, and by the crenated ornament lying before the other ornaments, instead of forming the inner edge of the opening, thus:
the mouldings a a being continued close behind the ornament, and entirely detached from it. There is a crenated ornament in the great doorway at Amiens. It is on the first of a succession of ribs forming the vault of the portal; but though the inner ribs may be seen behind it, it does not lie over, or rather on the mouldings, as in the fourth style, but stands as the termination of a separate part, or division, of the architecture. This crenated ornament is also sometimes placed obliquely. Compound arches of this form
are frequently repeated in the divisions of the windows; and curved gables,
