Then comes a _political_ class of disputants. One declares the style to be nothing more or less than the visible exponent of feudalism. If the system of Durandus were applied to this view, we should perhaps have the orders of the arch shown to represent the divisions of feudal aristocracy.--The point of the arch to be the king; the outer voussoirs the great, and the inner the lesser, vassals; the clustered pillars to be the bishops surrounded by their clergy; the ashlar stones the freemen; the rubble stones the villains and serfs; the mortar to be the bond of union or of slavery by which the whole system was cemented together; and the painted glass to be that clerical monopoly of learning by which the pure light of knowledge was imparted through an artificially-coloured medium. Others have, however, shown that the style developed itself just when feudalism was giving way, and just among those very communities who were most resolutely exerting themselves for its overthrow; and that, in England especially, it synchronises with the foundation of those institutions to which we owe our liberties and our greatness; while our knot-cutting friends would contemptuously pooh-pooh the whole question by saying that it had nothing to do either with feudalism or Magna Charta, but was simply the natural result of the Crusades. Again, as to its more practical characteristics; one party claims for it the most unbounded liberty, another denounces it as curbing the free following of practical and artistic requirements. The very same party sometimes describes it as excluding the light of day, and sometimes as offering no protection against the glare of sunshine. In fact, without going farther into these contrarieties, it may be sufficient to say that among those who have not gone much into the subject no opinions are too inconsistent either with one another or with facts to find ready advocates. My object in this and the succeeding lecture will be to show that the style originated in no occult influences; that, if it can be called either Christian, Teutonic, French, English, German, or Western European, it is so only in a plain, straightforward, and historical, and not in any hidden, exclusive, or mysterious, sense; but that it, in fact, arose from the application of plain common sense to plain practical requirements; that many of these requirements were not peculiar to the period, but belong to all time; that many were not limited to a race or climate, but are common, with certain modifications, to different races and countries; and that the application of the same class of common sense to altered requirements would produce results by no means militating against those thus arrived at, but, on the contrary, tending to enrich, to amplify, and to add new life, variety, and harmony to the art which it had first suggested.