4. The use of shafts or colonettes as means of decoration and accentuation. 5. The entire relinquishment of Classic proportions in the columns, which are henceforth proportioned in thickness to their _load_, irrespective of their _height_. 6. A system of decoration of its own, founded on Roman and Byzantine, but worked up into a new character, more or less independent of the original type, according to the locality, and to its removal from or proximity to antique monuments. 7. Great thickness of walls to resist the thrust of vaulting, aided by flat, pilaster-like buttresses in the principal planes of pressure. 8. In many cases--indeed, as a general rule--an air of gigantic massiveness in the entire construction. 9. The vaulting at first exactly accords with that of Roman buildings, embracing the barrel vault, the groined vault, and the dome, in nearly all the hitherto attained varieties. The arches always either semicircular or segmental. The above characteristics are chiefly of a mechanical nature. The style possesses, however, sentiments of an infinitely nobler kind than anything which these mere material elements could impart. It possesses a sternness and dignity almost unearthly--a majestic severity of sentiment which seems, as it were, as if intended to rebuke the unpitying barbarity of the age, and to awe its rude and lawless spirits into obedience to the precepts of the Divine law. Its aspect is religious to the utmost extreme; but it expresses the stern uncompromising _severity_ of religion rather than its more winning and elevating attributes--the asceticism of St. John the Baptist, the rebuker of sin and the preacher of repentance and of righteousness, rather than the spirituality of St. John the Evangelist, the preacher of Christian love, devotion, and praise. The sentiment they would express seems not so much “Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,” as “Fear before Him, all the earth;” and the task they prescribe to their ministers to be rather to proclaim “the day of vengeance” than “the acceptable year of the Lord”--less to “bind up the broken-hearted and comfort all that mourn,” than to “lift up their voice like a trumpet, and show the people their transgressions.” This stern simplicity is not, however, universal, for from the first the Romanesque architects _occasionally_ indulged in even rich ornamentation, and, at a later date, often carried it to profusion; yet, even in the richest decorations, they continued grave and severe--their lines were hard and precise, their foliage strong and harsh, and their figure sculpture (unless intended to be grotesque) was the very image of sternness--rude in art, but often of great dignity of expression; and though in an age like ours, of technical perfection and flippant criticism, it often provokes a smile, it was, in its own simple and untechnical age, well calculated to produce wholesome and solemnizing impressions.