Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 7.djvu/135

Rh NOTICES OP ARCHAEOLOGICAL PUBLICATIONS. 95 the Tudor from the ordinary tj^pe of Perpendicular. We believe that in the second of these, at least, we have most architecturists with us; and it is this in particular which is brought under our notice by the present work. Much as we are in general guided by the eye ; much as we affect to be ruled, and indeed are ruled, in the building up of systems, by far deeper matters than mere external character, it is strange that the introduction of tracery, which wrought so great a change, both in the aspect and in the constructive character of our buildings, did not at once suggest the separa- tion of the Geometrical, even in its earliest forms, from the Early English. King's College Chapel and the open clerestories of the Suffolk churches differ almost as much in construction as in visible aspect from Darlington and Salisbury ; and it is clear that a great part of the difference results (we can scarcely say indirectly) from the introduction of tracery. Yet, according to either nomenclature at present in use, the style in which tracery was first introduced is distinguished only by an " Early " or a " Late " from that which preceded it. So, again, geometrical and flowing tracery differ most absolutely in character and in principle, at least as much so as flowing, decorated, and perpendicular; and yet here again we have but a subsection, an '^ Early " and a " Late," to distinguish the two. Perhaps this may be, because, though the tracery peculiar to either style, the geometrical and the flowing, has been often enough described, some of the formal differences between them have not been adequately noticed. The character of the pure geometrical style consists, not so much in the mere use of geometrical figures as in the exclusive place which the circle or parts of a circle have in their construction,* and still more in the way in which those circles or parts of a circle are brought together, not in continuous curved lines, but as secants and tangents of one another. And this runs through the cusping even, and the mouldings ; for until very late in the geometrical style, we have no appearance anywhere of an ogee or of a continuous complex curve. To this we must add, that in the pure geometrical period, the centre of every circle, any part of which is taken into the whole figure, is always within the figure. In the ordinary quatre- foiled circle, as treated in geometrical tracery, one circle forms the boundary ; parts of foiir other circles, tangents of the first and of one another, form the cusps ; and the points of these are cut off abruptly by another circle, a secant of the four preceding, and concentric with the first ; and so a whole window of many lights may be drawn only ^nth the com- passes, and from centres within the whole design, and within each component portion of it which we are describing. With the flowing tracery it is just the reverse. Here the figures are composed of complex curves, running into one another, the centres of which are alternately within and without the figiu'e to be described; just as an ogee, one of the forms so distinctive of the style, is formed of parts of two circles, struck from centres, one on the one side and the other on the other side of the resultant line. The ordinary reticulated tracery is formed by - Hence the triangles ami squares introdurcd into tracery of this character are often described somewhat incongruously, as spherical triangles and spherical squares.