Much of the impressiveness of this exterior is due, not only to its grandeur of scale, both real and apparent, but to the lovely hue of the stone of which it is built, and the astonishing perfection of the masonry. At first sight, indeed, the appearance of the masonry of Salisbury is almost uncanny. Salisbury is not mouldered or corroded with age. “Time prints no wrinkles on its brow.” Its antiquity is that of a goddess ever young. The masonry, too, is that of a Greek temple; the precision that of the builders of the Parthenon; the joints fine, almost invisible; the blocks squared with mathematical precision; pass round the building from south transept eastward to north transept, and you will find that the stones in each course preserve their height with utmost exactness all these hundreds of feet. And so the building has the feeling of Greece in it. Gothic is a “small-stone” style, with joints openly displayed. Here, as in a Parthenon, the joints are invisible; the whole building seems one solid block—a monumental effect indeed. The crumbling masonry of Ely might belong to the ancient days of Saturn; Salisbury seems the work of a younger race of gods. Only when we scan its colour—the lovely colour of the Salisbury stone, that is seen nowhere else—“a pale, ashy grey, stained below with broad patches of red and yellow lichens,”—do we realise that this is no temple of yesterday, but one that has faced the stress of storm for more than six centuries. Her perpetual juvenility is at once the charm and the disappointment of Salisbury. Very noteworthy, also, are the sobriety and restraint and repose of the whole design: very ungothic, too. At first it passes unnoticed; after a time it is noticed—and noticed with astonishment—that the beauty of a design of consummate loveliness is gained in some mysterious way without the use of ornament. One realises at Salisbury—perhaps for the first time—that ornament is non-essential even in Gothic design. What ornament there is is of the slightest—a floriated finial to a buttress, a trefoiled corbel-table; the design would be little the worse if even this trifling amount of decoration were omitted. [Illustration: CLOISTER.] The success of the exterior of Salisbury depends, not on the littlenesses of architectural design, but on the great leading factors of any really great style—vastness of scale, yet further enhanced to the eye by multiplicity of parts; bold handling of the masses, combined nevertheless into a symmetrical whole: unity, harmony, proportion, shadow-effects. Beside these elemental factors, sculptured ornament is but “mint and cummin.”