It can scarcely be doubted but that much of the extravagance which we find in later German architecture arose from the reaction of the glass-painters on the builders. When first painted glass was extensively introduced, the figures were grouped or separated by architectural details, such as niches or canopies, copied literally from the stone ornaments of the building itself. Before long, however, the painter, in Germany at least, spurned at being tied down to copy such mechanical and constructive exigencies; he attenuated his columns, bent and twisted his pinnacles, drew out his canopies, and soon invented for himself an architecture bearing the same relation to the stone Gothic around him that the architecture shown on the paintings of Pompeii bears to the temples and buildings from which it is derived. In Germany, painters and builders alike were striving after lightness, but in this the painter was enabled by his material easily to outstrip the mason. The essentially stone character of architecture was soon lost sight of. With the painter, the finials, the crockets, and the foliage of the capitals again became copies of leaves, instead of the conventional representations of nature which they are and must be in all true art. Like Sir James Hall in modern times, the speculative mind in Germany was not long, when advanced thus far, in suggesting a vegetable theory for the whole art. All these steps are easily to be traced in the sequence of German painted glass still preserved to us. The more extravagant and intricate the design, the more it was admired by the Germans. It was, therefore, only natural that the masons should strive after the same standard, and should try to realise in stone the ideas which the painters had so successfully started on the plain surface of the glass. The difficulty of the task was an incentive. Almost all the absurdities of the later styles may be traced more or less to this source, and were it worth while, or were this the place, it would be easy to trace the gradual decay of true art from this cause. One example, taken from the church at Chemnitz (Woodcut No. 763), must suffice, where what was usual, perhaps admissible, in glass, is represented in stone as literally as is conceivable. When art came to this, its revival was impossible among a people with whom such absurdities could be admired, as their frequency proves to have been the case. What a fall does all this show in that people who invented the old Round-Gothic style of the Rhenish and Lombard churches, which still excite our admiration, as much from the simple majesty of their details as from the imposing grandeur of their whole design! CIVIL ARCHITECTURE.