Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/27

I upper classes. This architecture could never become really an architecture of the people; and the cities and, here and there, the church held out against it. But with the growth of artificial conditions the new fashion at length prevailed, and under its influence it was not strange that the Gothic monuments of the country were not only neglected and despised, but shamefully, and often irreparably, disfigured.

In England the taste for the pseudo-classic orders, fostered by the genius of such men as Inigo Jones and Wren, was not less hostile to Gothic. Any feeling for mediæval forms which had lingered on through the Elizabethan period was soon effectually quenched. Germany, though not quick to accept the Renaissance style, was also at length conquered by it. Everywhere some form, though often a travesty, of the revived classic taste prevailed. Gothic art became everywhere extinct.

Fashion, however, began after a while to change. In the course of the eighteenth century an antiquarian interest in pointed architecture was awakened and received a considerable stimulus from the zealous but ignorant advocacy of Horace Walpole. The attention of amateurs began to be directed towards existing monuments, and the publication (1780-1795) of Carter's volumes with measured drawings, followed before long by the works of Britton and Pugin, created an extensive, though not a discriminating taste for the long-abandoned pointed style. So undiscriminating, indeed, was this new interest that it long remained unproductive of good results. No just notion of the nature of Gothic was anywhere entertained. That it involved principles beyond those which were revealed to a superficial view nobody yet imagined. The whole subject of the modifications and transformations which pointed architecture had undergone at different periods in its history was shrouded in obscurity. No correct classifications had been made, and attention was, for the most part, directed to the later and least excellent varieties. Before there could be progress toward a true understanding of pointed buildings, it was necessary that the different forms which they had assumed should be examined and classified.

But at length this progress began. In the year 1817 appeared Rickman's first essay—An Attempt to 