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312 emotion by the solemn grandeur, the holy symbols, and the sacred purpose of a pile dedicated to the glory of God.

There is another apparent contradiction betwixt the two styles, namely, that whilst the age of devotional buildings is for the most part wrapt in obscurity, the builder being seldom known, there often existing a wide interval between the date of the foundation and that of its actual erection or consecration, and therefore the date becomes merely conjectural, left to the guess of ingenuity to settle, or to the diligence of induction to establish, or to fix by analogy, from some peculiar resemblance to other religious buildings presumed to be coeval, the mass of information relating to military structures, unhappily themselves too often swept away, is afforded to us in minute and continuous completeness. So that it may be truly asserted we have, on the one hand, Gothic buildings still rearing their lofty heads in pristine magnificence, proclaiming in notes of harmony the duties of men, without any record being left us to indicate whose skill and piety constructed them; and on the other hand there are military remains, mere roofless, tottering walls, crumbling, venerable ruins, whose darkest, dampest nook may be often explained by an entry on an official document, by a record of a genuine and undoubted nature laid up among the national archives. Nor, whilst they furnish every needful illustration, is their value less remarkable for the curious light they frequently throw upon the manners and domestic usages of the period, for the political and statistical information they abound in, for the animated reality and freshness of their facts, as contradistinguished from all other sources of cotemporaneous history.

Before proceeding to adduce a few extracts from these evidences, the attention must be re-directed to the noble family already mentioned. We have seen how there was united in the same person the character of warrior, architect, and devotee, and his son the third earl of Northampton strove with filial enthusiasm to emulate the actions that have transmitted his father's name to posterity. He too in his day became an architect. He assisted in laying a corner-stone to the honour of St. Guthlac at Croyland, and placed thereon a gift of a hundred marks for the workmen: he endowed the abbey of Sawtry in Huntingdonshire, and terminated his labours by erecting a similar religious house to St. Mary de Pratis in the verdant meads of De la Prè near Northampton. It cannot be said