The same may be said of the capitals of the pillars, which in all the best buildings vary with every shaft, and appear to have been executed after the architect had finished his labours, by artists of a very high class. In the best age, in France at least, as in the examples from Rheims, shown in Woodcut No. 668, they would appear to have retained a reminiscence of a Roman Corinthian order, but to have used it with a freedom entirely their own. CONSTRUCTION. It has been shown that the exigencies of a Gothic cathedral were a stone roof, a glass wall, and as great an amount of space on the floor, as little encumbered with pillars and points of support, as could be obtained. The two first of these points have been sufficiently insisted upon in the preceding pages; the last, however, demands a few more remarks, as the success achieved by the masons in the Middle Ages in this respect was one of their chief merits, though it was but a mechanical merit after all, and one in which they hardly surpassed their masters the Romans. The basilica of Maxentius, for instance, covers a space of 68,000 sq. ft., or about the average size of a French cathedral, and the points of support, or in other words the piers and walls, occupy only 6900 sq. ft., or between a 9th and a 10th part of the whole area. If we turn to the great cathedral of St. Peter’s at Rome, we find the points of support occupying more than one-fourth of the whole area, though built on the model, and almost a copy, of the Roman basilica. At St. Mary’s at Florence they occupy one-fifth; and in St. Paul’s, London, and the Pantheon at Paris, the walls and pillars occupy in the first rather more, in the other rather less, than one-sixth. If from these we turn to some of the Mediæval examples, we find for instance at The whole area. Solid. Ratio. Bourges 61,591 11,908 0·181, or between 1-5th and 1-6th. Chartres 68,261 8,888 0·130, or 1-8th. Paris 64,108 7,852 0·122, or between 1-8th and 1-9th. St. Ouen 47,107 4,637 0·090, or between 1-10th and 1-11th. The figures, however, at Bourges include a heavy and extended porch not belonging to the original design, which if omitted would reduce the fractional proportion considerably; and if the unbuilt towers of St. Ouen were excluded, the proportion of the points of support to the area would be less than one-twelfth.