One of the lessons I think we should learn is to work in the same free and liberal spirit in which our forefathers worked: not to do _what_ they did, but _as_ they did. If we, on the one hand, shut ourselves up in our own country, and, reproducing the style we find to have prevailed here, sulkily rejecting the lessons to be learned from neighbouring lands, we may produce a servile reproduction of _what_ was done by our predecessors, but shall be acting anything but _as_ they acted. If, on the other hand, we travel widely, and, giving free license to our individual preferences or momentary fancies, we import now this style, and now that--here building in a French, there in an Italian variety of our style--we shall in each case be doing _what_ was done in one or another province of Mediæval art, but shall be equally far from doing as the old artists did: the one course involves servility, the other adds to it frivolity. The great principle on which the Mediæval architects of each country instinctively acted was, while adhering in the main each to the dialect of the great art which happened to be current amongst them, to improve it by the free importation of ideas and adoption of hints from whencesoever they might be derived, but especially from the dialects of the same artistic language. Thus, for instance, the Pointed architecture of the royal domain of France is, as a whole, a logical sequence of the Romanesque of the same district; yet no scruple was felt at importing into it the Byzantine capitals and foliage, which had come to them through the medium of Venice; and to this foreign importation they owed some of the greatest beauties of their architecture; nay, if the Oriental origin of the Pointed arch be true, they went further, and engrafted upon their traditional art a feature learned from the infidels they were combating. Again, the English Pointed may be traced step by step from the preceding style, yet they had no hesitation about introducing into it details developed by the French. The Germans carried the principle too far: giving up their own traditional variety of Pointed architecture, they adopted the French developments ready made; yet, having done so, they worked them up in a manner quite their own: while in Italy, the new style having been brought in upon the pre-existing Romanesque, they soon elaborated it into a dialect as distinctively characteristic as those of other European countries. Besides this, no nation had any scruples about employing artists belonging to another; so that the advancement made by each became in a degree the common property of all; and even the woven fabrics and other manufactures imported from the far East were allowed to offer suggestions to the European decorator.