of flamboyant Gothic in civic buildings. The latest of all and the smallest one of importance is that at Audenarde in Belgium, built between 1525-30. It is represented in [Plate XXXIX], lending itself well to pictorial reproduction on a small scale because it depends but little on the sculptured details. A single Madonna with the Child, above the loggia from which the town authorities would speak to the people in the days of municipal independence, is the only representative sculpture of importance in all this front, below the cornice. The fantastic Gothic tracery with conventional carving covers the blank wall spaces with a continuous veil of slight and not unpleasant roughening; and the wall spaces are so small that this formal kind of ornament is not disagreeable. Small statues should have been placed in the niches; but the building does not seem to suffer much from their absence. We can judge of it as being what it is, a most simple and practical City Hall, built with pointed arches, with a steep roof adorned by tower, dormer window and pinnacle, and the whole structure covered by this thin veil of moulded, cusped and traceried ornament, chiefly because the church architecture of previous years had led up to that kind of design by natural evolution, and because the spirit of the time knew of but one architectural treatment. Therefore, without vaulting, with five stories of rooms replacing the great hall of the church, with windows made to open and shut for the convenience of the inhabitants of small rooms, the building is yet closely in agreement with the church building of the time, and is to be judged as a part of the great and long supreme style out of which it has grown.
In the famous south porch of the cathedral at Albi, this florid Gothic has reached its culmination. [Plate X]L shows the outer porch; that which, when the cathedral was really a fortress of some importance, guarded the first approach to the long flight of stairs, the outer perron. Nothing is more attractive among the minor charms