earlier ages, never to err in propriety, and their bad taste shows that they have been to school with the Renaissance. They seem at times even to delight in trying to make their designs as atrocious as possible (Ill. 259). The florid ornament runs riot in vulgar and over-ornate forms, unrestrained by any sense of propriety or decorum, while such aberrations as pendants, multiple ribs, wavy mouldings, and Renaissance tracery disfigure even the structural portions of the building.

However, among many weeds, the last phase of flamboyant architecture has left us a few flowers of the rarest beauty. The transept ends of Beauvais (Ill. 240) — designs of superb composition, combining the most lavish detail with a rugged, an almost austere grandeur of ensemble - must always be accounted among the masterpieces of medieval art. The façade of Rouen (Ill. 269) is a phantasy full of imagination and poetry. And between these very good designs and the very bad ones stand many compositions of varying shades of merit. Thus even in its death agony, flamboyant architecture is not altogether deserving of the obloquy and scorn which it has usually received at the hands of art critics.

Flamboyant architecture is primarily a decorative art. Since the Gothic builders had perfected the structure to such a point that no futher advance was possible, their successors of the flamboyant period merely accepted the Gothic stone skeleton as they found it, retaining all the distinctive features of the XIII century church the glass walls, the vaults, the isolated supports, the flying buttresses; they contrived, however, by means of a new system of ornament to give the old structural forms a totally different appearance. This result was accomplished at the expense of strict artistic and architectural propriety, by making ornaments of structural forms and by fashioning decorations from features intended to be strictly structural.

In this the flamboyant architects showed themselves the true successors of the master builders of the XIV and even of the last half of the XIII century. Ever since the problems of Gothic construction had been fully solved there had been an increasing tendency to lay stress upon questions of design and

decoration to the neglect of the study of the construction, which, since it was now perfectly solved and understood, offered little opportunity for inventive originality. Gradually, therefore, the structure came to be subordinated to decoration, and the great principle of the early Gothic masters was thus reversed.

The ogee arch, which may be taken as one of the distinctive peculiarities of the new style, is essentially a non-structural feature. In fact, the arches themselves were seldom ogee at all, but were ordinarily merely surmounted by a heavy moulding or gable twisted into a form of double curvature (Ill. 270). The point of the ogee was commonly prolonged and crowned with a finial; in the XVI century this idea came to be developed and carried to absurd lengths (Ill. 189). Yet, notwithstanding such aberrations, the ogee arch, whose lines are usually full of grace and charm, served excellently to harmonize the severe form of a pointed arch with the graceful suave character of flamboyant design. To adjust more smoothly the lines of the arch with its ogee gable, the flattened or three-centered arch (Ill. 270) was often substituted for the pointed form. This motive was at times carried so far that the arch became merely a flat lintel with rounded corners (Ill. 270), though the Tudor, or four-centered arch, which lends so much charm to the perpendicular edifices of England, was seldom or never employed -in France.

In one or another of these forms the flamboyant builders employed the ogee arch over doorways, windows, in engaged arcades, - in every portion of the edifice where there was a space to be spanned, or a wall surface to be decorated. But especially did they delight in this motive in designing the openwork carving that came to surmount not only the great portals and the façades of the nave and transepts but the entire exterior of the building. Adorned with a mass of the most intricate carvings and ornament, the ogee arches wandered across a background equally intricate and also constructed of open work, interpenetrating, intersecting the other mouldings, forming a veritable lace-work in stone, a marvel of the last perfection of technique in stone cutting (Ill. 271).

Until the XVI century these lace-work designs continued