“Gothic architecture seems to have attained its ultimate perfection in the Fourteenth Century, at which period everything belonging to it was conceived and executed in a free and bold spirit, all the forms were graceful and natural, and all the details of foliage and other sculptures were copied from living types, with a skill and truth of drawing which has never been surpassed. Conventional forms were in a great measure abandoned, and it seems to have been rightly and truly considered that the fittest monuments for the House of God were faithful copies of His works; and so long as this principle continued to be acted on, so long did Gothic architecture remain pure. But in the succeeding century, under the later Henrys and Edwards, a gradual decline took place: everything was moulded to suit a preconceived idea, the foliage lost its freshness, and was moulded into something of a rectangular form; the arches were depressed, the windows lowered, the flowing curves of the tracery converted into straight lines, panelling profusely used, and the square form everywhere introduced; until at length the prevalence of the horizontal line led easily and naturally to the Renaissance of the classic styles, though in an impure and much degraded form. The mixture of the two styles first appears in the time of Henry VII.,--a period in which (though remarkable for the beauty and delicacy of its details) the grand conceptions of form and proportion of the previous century seem to have been lost. Heaviness or clumsiness of form, combined with exquisite beauty of detail, are the characteristics of this era.”--(J. H. P.) The styles are generally classified as follows: I. Norman, or Romanesque; II. Early English; III. Decorated; IV. Perpendicular. “Soon after the Norman Conquest a great change took place in the art of building in England. On consulting the history of our cathedral churches, we find that in almost every instance the church was rebuilt from its foundations by the first Norman bishop, either on the same site or on a new one; sometimes, as at Norwich and Peterborough, the cathedral was removed to a new town altogether, and built on a spot where there was no church before; in other cases, as at Winchester, the new church was built near the old one, which was not pulled down until after the relics had been translated with great pomp from the old church to the new. In other instances, as in York and Canterbury, the new church was erected on the site of the old one, which was pulled down piecemeal as the new work progressed. These new churches were in all cases on a much larger and more magnificent scale than the old.