Up to that period the Germans showed no tendency to adopt window tracery, in the sense in which it was afterwards understood, nor to divide their windows into compartments by mullions. I do not even know of an instance in any church of the windows being so grouped together as to suggest such an expedient. All their older windows, on the contrary, are simple round-headed openings, with the jambs more or less ornamented by nook-shafts and other such expedients. At the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th century they seem to have desired to render the openings more ornamental, probably because tracery had to a certain extent been adopted in France and the Netherlands at that period. They did this first by foiling circles and semicircles; the former a pleasing, the latter a very unpleasing, form of window, but not so bad as the three-quarter windows—if I may so call them—used in the church of Sion at Cologne (Woodcut No. 738) and elsewhere: these, however, are hardly so objectionable as the fantastic shapes they sometimes assumed, as in the examples (Woodcut No. 739), taken from St. Quirinus at Neuss. Many others might be quoted, the forms of which are constructively bad without being redeemed by an elegance of outline that sometimes enables us to overlook their other faults. The more fantastic of these, it is true, were seldom glazed, but were mere openings in towers or into roofs. These windows are also generally found in transition specimens, in which men try experiments before settling down to a new course of design. Notwithstanding this, they are very objectionable, and are the one thing that shakes that confidence which might otherwise be felt in the power of the old German style to have perfected itself without foreign aid. CHAPTER V. POINTED STYLE IN GERMANY. CONTENTS. History of style—St. Gereon, Cologne—Churches at Gelnhausen—Marburg— Cologne Cathedral—Freiburg—Strasburg—St. Stephen’s, Vienna—Nuremberg— Mühlhausen—Erfurt. IT is scarcely necessary to repeat—what has been already perhaps sufficiently insisted upon—that the Germans borrowed their pointed style from the French at a period when it had attained its highest degree of perfection in the latter country. At all events, we have already seen that the pointed style was commonly used in France in the first half of the 12th century, and that it was nearly perfect in all essential parts before the year 1200; whereas, though there may be here and there a solitary instance of a pointed arch in Germany (though I know of none) before the last-named date, there is certainly no church or building erected in the pointed Gothic style the date of which is anterior to the first years of the 13th century. Even then it was timidly and reluctantly adopted, and not at first as a new style, but rather as a modification to be employed in conjunction with old forms.