I have already mentioned the extraordinary tardiness of the Germans in relinquishing their much-loved Romanesque. I am not prepared, as in the case of French and English buildings, to trace out the first appearance of the pointed arch, and I have no doubt that there are numerous instances of its use at an earlier date; but there is nothing like a transition into the pointed-arch _style_ till the commencement of the thirteenth century--after it had been completed both in England and France. Nevertheless, the German transition is as distinctly national and as evident an offspring of their own Romanesque as that of France or England; indeed, it is so peculiar as to appear, at first sight, to have little in connection with the architecture of either of those countries, and is usually spoken of as being only a slight variety upon German Romanesque. Let any one look at a few of its leading productions--as St. Martin, St. Gereon, and a few others at Cologne; the churches at Neuss near Dusseldorf, Limburg on the Lahn, Zinzig, or Gelnhaussen; the western façades at Andernach, Xanten, St. Sibald at Nuremberg, and at Halberstadt, the east end of Magdeburg, or at the representations of the cloisters (now destroyed) of St. Gereon, or Altenberg, or at any of the multitudinous list of German churches of the first quarter of the thirteenth century--and he will at once see that they present as natural and logical a transition from their own national Romanesque as the works of Suger do from that of the royal domain of France. The use of the _crochet_ capitals in some of the later examples is the solitary instance of any direct imitation of the already perfected transition in the neighbouring countries. The great misfortune of the German transition was that it occurred so late that, before they could perfect it, the French had passed into the second stage of their developed Pointed, and had worked out the great problem of window tracery. The consequence was that German patience at length gave way;--they relinquished their transition just as they were perfecting a Pointed style of their own, and, throwing themselves almost wholly into the hands of the French, passed at one step from their own curious and characteristic art into the fully-developed style of Amiens and Beauvais. Mr. Fergusson laments this as having prevented the development of a perfect _round-arched_ style; but it must be recollected that the round-arched style of Germany had been almost entirely relinquished previously to the succumbing of their national architecture before the dominant star of France: the loss, then, we have to lament is not that it prevented a more perfect round-arched development, but that it suspended, when on the eve of being perfected, the formation of a really national German variety of the _pointed-arched_ style; and though they did much to remedy this, it unquestionably rendered their architecture for the next century in some degree a German version of French style.