As I said on a former occasion, I will not go into the general question of the _revival_ of Gothic architecture, but will assume it as a _fait accompli_, and proceed to consider some questions as to the practical carrying of it out. One point which has given rise to much difference of opinion is the question of what _period_ and variety of Mediæval architecture we should best take as the groundwork of our own developments. When, during the long interval between the cessation of Mediæval architecture and our own day, it was temporarily returned to in any special instance, it seems to have been viewed rather as a _dormant_ than an _extinct_ art, and the style chosen was always its _latest_ phase; as if it had only to be re-awakened at the point at which it had fallen asleep. And in the same manner, in our own day, nearly all the earlier works of the revival were in the latest form of the style, as if the revival was the mere prolongation of a chain, and to be attached to its last link. This was the _traditional_ phase in the revival. The interval had, however, been too lengthened to allow this imagined connection with the old but disused chain to hold good. People began to investigate and to philosophise and to write books about the style. All phases soon began to be equally known, and people could not help entertaining preferences. Rickman had awarded the palm to the Decorated; others preferred the Early English; and after a time all agreed that the latest link was the worst, and must not be adopted as the starting-point. Some tried Norman, some Early English, some Decorated. The Cambridge Camden Society seemed at first to favour Early English; but soon they laid their ban upon it, and preached a crusade against all but the sacred “Middle Pointed,” and even defined with minute accuracy the precise period of that style which they would stamp with their approval. It was to be the earliest phase of the later form of Middle Pointed; or, as a friend of mine jokingly defined it for them, the “_Early late Middle Pointed_.” Some, however, preferred the “late Early,” some the earliest Middle Pointed; and though a few still strayed into the heterodoxy of “First Pointed,” or even into deadlier errors, it came, after a time, to be a generally received opinion that the Middle style was the best groundwork for us to go upon, and that it might fairly be viewed that this had been so completely revived and re-adopted as to become _the_ style of our Gothic Renaissance. Though there was a good deal of nonsense current about it at the time, as if it were almost an article of religious faith, an “_Articulus stantis aut cadentis Ecclesiæ_,” there was, I must say, a great deal of common sense in the choice.