Strasbourg is much more interesting and poetic, with great refinement and originality in design, though its taste is far from impeccable, its structural sense gravely deficient. The tendency is wholly toward lace-like and fantastic design, but it has little resemblance to the late French flamboyant with its curving and interlacing lines; instead, it is more suggestive of the English perpendicular, with its scaffolding of vertical lines applied to, but not a part of, the basic fabric. It has no consistency of plan, for the eastern end, with its semicircular apse and portions of its transepts, is of a singularly noble type of twelfth-century Romanesque, while the nave is mid-thirteenth century and the tower and upper portion of the west front are a hundred years later. Confused as it is, there is an extraordinary charm about it all, for every part is personal and distinguished, full of novel and poetic ideas and all kinds of unaffected touches of genius. The wonderful colour of the exterior and the singularly fine glass of the interior have much to do with its general effect of a delicate mediæval loveliness that makes amends for its architectural shortcomings. Of the castle architecture of the Rhine there is [Illustration: STRASBOURG] little left from the mediæval period from which one can gain an adequate idea of its excellence, which was probably great. As in Luxembourg, everything has been shattered into wildly picturesque ruins which are outside the category of architecture, and such Renaissance work as Heidelberg is quite as far without the same category, though for another reason; here even picturesqueness of site and dilapidation cannot make amends for ignorance, assurance, and excruciating taste. As a matter of fact, the best architecture of the Rhine is the domestic building of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the half timber, many-gabled structures that give the little Rhine towns a charm that is unexcelled and testify to the native sense of beauty in the common people, when they were left alone and not confused by the self-satisfied and ill-bred interference of the connoisseur.