At Schulpforta in Saxony there is a very elegant church of the best age, and both in design and detail very different from anything else in Germany. Its immense relative length gives it a perspective rarely found in this country, where squareness is a much more common characteristic. At Oppenheim, in the Bavarian Rhenish Palatinate, is a church the choir of which is a simple and pleasing German apse with elongated windows. The nave, four bays in length, is an elaborate specimen of German ornamentation in its utmost extravagance, and, considering its age, in singularly bad taste, at least the lower part. The clerestory is unobjectionable, but the tracery of the windows and walls of the side-aisles shows how ingeniously it was possible to misapply even the beautiful details of the early part of the 14th century. In St. Werner’s Chapel, Bacharach, on the Rhine, this is avoided, and, as far as can be judged from the fragment that remains, it must, if it ever was completed, have been one of the best specimens of German art in that part of the country. The nave of the cathedral at Meissen, though marked by many of the faults of German design, is still a beautiful example of well-understood detail. [Illustration: 758. View of Maria Kirche at Mühlhausen. (From Puttrich, ‘Denkmäler.’)] [Illustration: 759. Plan of Maria Kirche at Mühlhausen. Scale 100 ft. to 1 in.] As a purely German design nothing can surpass the Maria Kirche at Mühlhausen (Woodcut No. 759). The nave is nearly square, 87 ft. by 105, and is divided into five aisles by four rows of pillars supporting the vaults, all at the same level. To the west is a triple frontispiece, and to the east (Woodcut No. 759) the three apses, which form so favourite an arrangement with the Germans. Externally its attenuation is painful to one accustomed to the more sober work of French architects; but this fault is here not carried to anything like the excess found in other churches. Internally the effect is certainly pleasing, and altogether there are perhaps few better specimens of purely German design in pointed architecture. The church of St. Blasius, in the same town, is far from being so good an example of the style. The cathedral at Erfurt is a highly ornamented building, but though possessing beautiful details in parts, yet it shows the slenderness of construction which is so frequent a fault in German Gothic buildings. The church of St. Severus in the same town resembles that at Mühlhausen, but possesses so characteristic a group of three spires[79] over what we would consider the transept—or just in front of the apse—that it is illustrated (Woodcut No. 760). It certainly looks like a direct lineal descendant from the old Roman basilican apse grown into Gothic tallness. Though common in Germany, placed either here or at the west front, I do not know of any single example of such an arrangement either in France or England.