All that I had heard of Lübeck made me promise myself a great treat in the study of the old brick buildings and the old treatment of brick. I must confess, however, that this was not so good or so satisfactory as I had expected, and that it is certainly very inferior to the Italian brick work. It is generally coarsely done, and there is but little attempted in the way of tracery, and that little is never very effective. I saw nothing, for instance, at all comparable to such brick work as one sees at Verona, Mantua, and Cremona; and I doubt much whether Germany produces any which can be compared to it. Except in one instance, and then only to a very slight extent, there is no attempt at all at mixing stone with brick, save at the quoins of the towers, where there are always immense blocks of stone, intended for strength, but contributing, I suspect, to the weakness which is quite a characteristic of all the churches in Lübeck, Hamburg, Lüneburg, and generally throughout this brick district. The brick churches of Italy are remarkable in that they owe much of their beautiful effect either to the mixture of stone with brick, or to the exquisite moulding of the brick, and the care and delicacy with which it was built; and one observes that whilst in Italy all the buildings have an air of refinement, in northern Germany they have an air of great coarseness, to which, perhaps, the entire absence of what can fairly be called window tracery in a great degree conduces. Something may, however, be learnt even from the failure of other men, and so some points may well be attended to in this German brick work. And first it teaches us, distinctly and unmistakably, that brick is no material for window traceries; the necessity of using it ends either in the repetition of very simple and ugly windows, such as are almost universal in Lübeck; or, as in the Stadt-Haus, and again in the very remarkable church of S. Katharine, at Brandenburg, in the eternal repetition of the same small piece of moulded tracery, which, of necessity not very good in itself, becomes, by much repetition, quite hateful. And the effect is painful in the extreme upon the whole practice of art: in all cases, without any exception, I believe, where men have condescended to attempt to execute traceries or carvings in brick moulded in this way, the tendency has been, naturally enough, to repeat for ever things which by repetition become cheap. _One_ moulded piece of brick tracery would be dearer than one like it in stone; but multiply it a hundred or a thousand times, and it becomes infinitely cheaper, but who can say by how much more infinitely tedious and unartistic! So at Brandenburg, crockets, crocketed gablets, component parts of tracery, and the like, are repeated over and over again, in a manner which is really marvellous; and because it was necessary to do this, immense sham fronts, sham parapets, and the like, must be raised,