I have dwelt much, in my earlier lectures, on the study of the vigorous and onward-striving works of the transition: and I confess that to me this is the most captivating period. I have already sufficiently indicated the leading examples of it, though you will find it interspersed with other styles all over the country. I think myself that no style is more calculated to excite a grandeur of sentiment, but none seems to me to have been so little studied from English examples, or rather, I should have said, from _British_ examples, for it is as finely developed in Wales and in Scotland as it is in England. I have said a good deal about studying it as a _historical_ phase of the style, but this, though necessary, is in point of fact a very secondary matter. You must much rather study it _artistically_, with reference to its intrinsic merits and its noble beauty, and _morally_, as illustrating the elevated sentiment and noble earnestness of those who, while pressing forward a new style of art, generated at every step such glorious productions. I have said less, perhaps, and spoken with less enthusiasm of the fully-developed Early Pointed style, not from a lower appreciation of its merits, but because it seems rather a breathing-place--a point of attainment--in the march, than especially a point of noble pressing onward. Nor need I enumerate the special objects of study belonging to the period. They are sown broadcast over our own and neighbouring lands, and form the staple of our most magnificent, and a large proportion of our humble, Mediæval remains. No tour, however, is more prolific of instruction in this style than that of the northern abbeys, and this tour may be repeated again and again with ever fresh delight, and extended with great profit over the borders and far away into Scotland. After this we come to another transition, and--the period of rest being at an end--we find again much of the same earnest striving as during the earlier transition. I would recommend a very special amount of study to be devoted to this style--for it is not reasonable to suppose that traceried windows are to be banished from our revival; and loving, as most of us do, the vigour of the earlier periods, this second transition--the connecting link between the earlier and the middle periods--offers most valuable material for our own developments: indeed, I cannot conceive of a more promising course of corrective training for those among us who have followed early and foreign work till it has grown into an actual mania, than to set themselves the task of following up, _nolens volens_, the minute study in all its details of a carefully selected series of work of this second English transition. For such a course I would especially recommend the following examples:--