Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 7.djvu/325

Rh activity and vitality given to these elements, by forming and framing them, not as merely continuations of the parts below, with a smaller breadth and finer details, but as parts tending upwards upon a plan of their own, which separates them from the masses out of which they spring. Thus we have (in the Decorated style especially) buttresses terminated upwards by pinnacles set diagonally upon the rectangular plan of the buttress, either at its summit or on the set-offs, or by octagonal pinnacles; and the crockets and finials of such pinnacles, and even of the hood mouldings of windows, doors, and other arches, may be considered as a manifestation of the same principle; for these ornaments are quite extraneous to the notion of frame-work; and yet, how blank and bare would an ogee canopy or a triangular canopy to a door or window appear, without crockets or finials!

This principle is exhibited on a larger scale where we have an octagonal spire growing out of a square tower; especially if the transition from the square to the octagonal form be made by means of vertical growths, as is the case in many of the principal edifices of Germany, though rarely in England. The Romanesque forms, especially as they appear in the neighbourhood of the Rhine, naturally led to such a mode of composition, when the Gothic style came into full play; for there were introduced abundantly in the Rhenish Romanesque churches, four-sided spires set diagonally on squares, and towers which, in their upper part, were octagonal with a triangular head to each face of the octagon, and with a spire, accommodated in various ways to this form. Such a tower was treated with great skill by the German Gothic architects. The square, reduced to an octagon by cutting off the corners, left, at the corners, masses which shot upwards in detached groups of niches and pinnacles; and the gradual preparations in the lower parts, for thus detaching these masses, and in the upper part, for grouping and connecting them with the central mass, are the subject of a vast variety of ingenious contrivances. These appear in such towers as Freiburg, Cologne, Ulm, Vienna, Strasburg; which are examples of a style of composition, altogether different from anything which exists in this country, where octagonal spires commonly either stand on a square tower, within a battlement, the mode of connection not being exhibited to the eye; or are (as in the churches of Northamptonshire) connected with