Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/559

 Bk. II. Ch. VIII. CENTRAL PRANCE. 527 until in fact the entire wall was taken up by this new species of decoration. So far as internal architecture is concerned, the invention of painted o-lass was perhaps the most beautiful ever made. The painted slabs of the Assyrian palaces are comparatively poor attempts at the same effect. The hieroglyphics of the Egyptians were far less splendid and complete ; nor can the painted temples of the Greeks, nor the mosaics and frescoes of the Italian churches, be compared with the brilliant effect and party-colored glories of the windows of a perfect Gothic cathedral, where the whole history of the Bible was written in the hues of the rainbow by the earnest hand of faith. Unfortunately no cathedral retains its painted glass in anything like such completeness; and so little is the original intention of the architects understood, that we are content to admire the plain surface of white glass, and to consider this as the appropriate filling of tra- ceried windows, just as our fathers thought that whitewash was not only the purest, but the best mode of decorating a Gothic interior. What is worse, modern architects, when building Gothic churches, fill their sides with large openings of this glass, not reflecting that a gallery of picture-frames without the pictures is after all a sorry ex- hi1)ition; but so completely have we lost all real feeling for the art that its absurdity does not strike us now. It will, however, be impossible to understand what follows, unless we bear in mind that all windows in all churches erected after the middle of the I'ith century were at least intended to be filled with painted glass, and that the principal and guiding motive in all the ■changes subsequently introduced into the architecture of the age was to obtain the greatest possible space and the best-arranged localities for its disjDlay. FREEMASOfRY. The institution of freemasonry is another matter on which, like the invention of the pointed arch, a great deal more has been said than the real importance of the subject at all deserves. Still this subject has been considered so all-important that it is impossible to pass it over here without some reference, if only to ex])lain why so little notice will be taken of its influence, or of the important names which are connected with it. Before the middle of the 12th and beginning of the 13th century, it is generally admitted that the corporation of freemasons was not sufticiently organized to have had much influence on art. At that time it is supposed to have assumed more importance, and to have been the principal guiding cause in the great change that then took place in architecture. Those who adopt this view, forget that at that time all trades and professions were organized in the same manner, and