Everywhere there is a lack of emphasis, not only in structure but in detail. The windows are not recessed, the capitals are small, the mouldings are delicate rather than forcible. The main piers are thin, their shafts are rather monotonously and tamely divided, the mouldings of the arches are narrow and shallow, the mullions of the clerestory and the shafts on each side of them are unusually slender; and this is peculiarly unfortunate in a nave, the width of which is greater both actually and proportionately, than that of any other English Gothic cathedral. To make a successful design of such proportions, there was need of strong vertical lines to give it the appearance of unusual strength: and not only the appearance but the reality. It is a significant fact that the builders were afraid to place a stone vault on their nave, and thus it is a Gothic building without that feature which gives its whole significance to the Gothic style, and by reason of which the design of this nave came to be what it was. It is a curious paradox, that the builders of York should have abandoned one of the most attractive features of earlier art in pursuit of a more logical design, and should then have been forced to abandon that very vault which gave their design all its logic. It is as if a dramatist strictly subordinated all his characters before the central figure of the hero, and then discovered that the exigencies of the plot would not allow of the introduction of the hero at all. The most casual observer, on first entering the nave of York Minster, must have a vague feeling of disappointment, a consciousness that something is wanting; he will see that his feeling is justified, when he learns that it is the first building in England of which the design is entirely dominated by the necessities of a stone vault, and yet that it is crowned by a wooden roof. But it must not be supposed that this nave is altogether to be condemned, as some critics have condemned it. Each bay, looked at by itself, is not only perfectly logical and coherent in design, but is filled with delicate and appropriate detail. The capitals, if small, are finely carved; the mouldings well contrasted and subordinated; and the window tracery is the finest possible. It is a work of the best age of architecture with all the characteristics in detail of that age; yet it is not the work of a builder of genius, but of a careful scholar, who has imperfectly assimilated the principles of his masters.