In my last lecture I gave you an outline of the course of study requisite to obtaining a knowledge of Mediæval architecture, so far as this is to be done by the studying and sketching from ancient buildings. I purpose, in this, to carry on the same subject into other particulars, and also to offer some suggestions as to the actual practice of the revived style. I might have appeared, in what I have said, almost to presuppose--what is improbable, if not impossible--that those whom I have been advising as to their studies have the entire command of their time, and are comparatively free from the demands of every-day business. I not only do _not_ suppose, but should be as far as possible from desiring, this; for I am convinced that those whose usual occupations are not such as to familiarise them with the demands and the difficulties of practical work, and with the questions which are ever being suggested by actually working out the details of architecture for practical use, are not prepared to profit in the fullest degree from the study of old examples. This study, and the practical work to which it is the only key, must go on _hand in hand_. There are numberless intricacies and niceties; problems long since solved; difficulties ingeniously met; clever ways of making accidents, which in their own nature would cause a blemish, the means of adding beauty; numberless instances in which decorative or other treatment was the result of some practical reason which would at first sight appear to be merely a matter of taste; and a thousand other instructive and important matters which would be entirely passed over or fail of approving themselves to the understanding of the student who is not prepared to appreciate them by the suggestion to themselves of the same problems, the same difficulties, the same little knots to be untied, the same little intricacies to be unravelled, and the same calls for clever contrivance to meet accidental circumstances arising in their own daily practical work. The man, on the other hand, who is _always_ at practical work, without studying much from old examples, becomes dull and normal, or flighty and crotchety, according to the bent of his own mind; while, if he constantly supplies and revivifies his practical work by study from original examples, and fits his mind to receive these lessons by his practical work, he is prevented from becoming dull and lifeless by the constant suggestions of brightness and life which he receives, or from becoming crotchety and over fanciful by the _reasonableness_ which he finds to pervade the objects which he studies, and the evident aim which they evince rather to _chasten_ and _conceal_--to subject to the doctrine of reserve--their clever contrivances than to flaunt them obviously to public gaze.