The aisles of the nave of Magdeburg cathedral seem also to me to be vastly superior to any other German work of the date that I know, whilst the western rood-screen and some of the details of the western choir at Naumburg are also of a degree of beauty which it would be very difficult to surpass elsewhere. The aisles of Paderborn cathedral, too, are of a peculiar but exceedingly good character. But these are, as I think, only exceptions which serve to prove the rule, and cannot in any degree be taken as evidence of the same kind of growth and gradual development that we trace with so much interest in every church and building of the Middle Ages in England. It was an architecture of fits and starts and conceits, not of growth, and full therefore of the contradictions and eccentricities which such a condition necessarily involves. And now having so far paved the way by a short statement of what is really the great peculiarity of German architecture, I will go on to consider and describe the several varieties of the style rather more in detail. And first of all, as to the ground-plan. It is a curious fact, that each national style of pointed architecture has been distinguished by its adherence to some peculiarity of ground-plan, as well as by other distinctive features. In England, we all know how great was the love for the square east end, and how strong the desire to extend the length of the nave to a sometimes almost unreasonable extent. In France, you know how steadily the apsidal termination was adhered to, and how completely it was the rule to have an aisle and chapels round the apse, making, in some of the finer French churches, an approach to absolute perfection of effect. You know, too, how very rare the square east end was in France, and yet how equally rare was any but a square end to the transepts. In Italy, again, there are peculiarities. Either you have immense halls, wide and long beyond all other examples, and borrowed, no doubt, from the ancient basilica; or apsidal churches, in which the aisles do not extend round the apse, and a series of apsidal chapels are sometimes added to the east of the transepts.