“The poetic faculty, the fine sense of beauty, grace, and humour, are the gifts of nature: technical and mechanical skill may be acquired by academy and happy circumstances. The union of these qualifications, which is requisite to perfection in a work of art, is indeed a rare felicity: their separate existence is a melancholy fact, exhibited by the history of schools; in which, for the most part mechanism and technicality usurp the higher attainment, and the wide distinction between the professional practitioner and the inborn artist is made apparent to us. But the end of all sound criticism should be to recognise these distinctions; to seize the poetical conception, however encumbered with a faulty execution; and to appreciate in their true merit the more exalted and the rarer qualities; else the poet descends to the grammarian, and the intellectual artist to the handicraftsman.” In foliated sculpture the Mediæval artists exceeded those of, perhaps, any other period. In their works you find the finest specimens of conventional or imaginary foliage,--founded on natural principles, yet not imitated from nature,--the best instances of the introduction of natural foliage, either wholly or united with the conventional,--and the most admirable examples of conventionalising nature, or, as Mr. Ruskin defines it, “bringing it into service,” so as to suit it to the material and to the forms, conditions, and purposes of architectural decoration, whether in relief or in painting. And not the least valuable of the lessons we learn from them is the acknowledgment of the mind and imagination of the art workman, who was not, as in classic architecture, employed to make for his capitals, or other features, an indefinite number of facsimiles of a single model, much less, as in most modern works, to copy in a hundred buildings a model which its author never meant to be used but in one; but after having acquired a due amount of skill in the arrangement and execution of his foliage, and a due knowledge of the general tone and feeling which the architect desired to express, was then left, under only general guidance, to the indulgence of his own inventive and artistic faculties, and thus rendered every capital, every boss, and every cusp a distinct and separate work of art, though all in harmony with the ideal of the whole design. In variety of expression Gothic architecture is excelled by none, being equally capable of the sternest and most majestic severity, and the most exquisite and refined elegance, as well as of all the intermediate varieties.