the kind must be more or less unsightly; thrust in as an after-thought, to remedy a constructive defect, it cannot fail to interfere with the original design and the original proportions. No one would have put them there, if he could have helped it; if constructive reasons had not called for the props, they would have been better away. When we compare the way in which this needful, though unpleasant, work was done in the different cases, we shall see a kind of clumsy ingenuity about the Wells work which may call for a certain measure of praise. At Salisbury and Canterbury the prop takes the form of a horizontal screen running across the arches. Such a form is more elegant in itself, and it interferes less with the general appearance of the building. But it is more distinctly an excrescence; it forces itself more strongly on the eye as something stuck in than when the props are worked into the earlier work in the way that they are at Wells. You all know the low arches under the lantern with the inverted arches on the top of them, the great circles in the spandrils, the whole arch turned into a kind of pattern of gigantic Geometrical tracery. It is very heavy, very clumsy; till the eye gets thoroughly familiar with it, it seems very ugly; but it is in every way ingenious. The prop is worked and fitted into the old work in a way in which it is not in the other cases. I can even think it possible that people who do not know the history, and who do not at once see from its details that it is an insertion, may even mistake it for part of the original design. And, granting its position at all, granting the peculiar form which it takes, there is something in the detail or rather lack of detail, something in the great size of the few mouldings and the absence of capitals and shafts, which seems to suit the boldness of the general outline. And I am not sure whether there is not a further propriety in the form chosen. The lines of the inverted arches roughly suggest a Saint Andrew's cross, and it may be that we have here, now that the affairs of Wells were beginning to brighten, a new trophy of success offered to the now triumphant elder brother.[15]