Italy received her Pointed architecture from France and Germany, and mingled it freely with her Classico-Lombardic traditions. The union produced many noble and many incongruous developments. The lessons they offer must be used with caution; but Italy being the land of ancient art, the land of sculpture, of painting, of rich marbles, of mosaic work, and of municipal and other civic edifices, the graft of Northern art upon so prolific a stock has, as may readily be imagined, produced varieties which the circumstances of Northern nations would have rendered impracticable in its native lands; and the suggestions they offer, if judiciously used, are well calculated to add copiousness to the style in the hands of its modern revivers. Of this I may have occasion to say more hereafter. The thirteenth century was to Mediæval art what the Periclean and Augustan ages were to the Greek and Roman; and in each case, though war and bloodshed are in themselves hostile to art, there can be no doubt that the excitement of the human mind, resulting from great national struggles, has tended to produce that advance in art which followed, in one case, the glorious assertion of national independence; in another, the conquest of the world; and in a third, the romantic and unselfish efforts of the Crusaders. It was a period of deep-seated mental excitement, of a prodigious upstirring of the human intellect. Our learned men at the present day may smile at the quaint and imperfect erudition of these early periods of our civilisation, but they should remember that they were our days of _youth_, of _warmth_, and of rising vigour, while the more perfected literature of our own age may possibly be found to superadd to its maturity a few symptoms of old age. This youthful energy pervaded every branch of art; everything seemed to experience a new, a generous, and vigorous impulse. All Europe became filled with the productions of the newly generated art; every city became a repertory of noble and sublime architecture, and every town and village became possessed of productions equally beautiful, if more modest in their pretensions; while the intervening country was studded over with castles and monastic establishments, in which the same majestic art displayed itself in ever-varying forms, each suited to meet their different requirements. Nothing is more difficult than to describe a perfected art. My last two lectures traced out the gradual construction of Pointed architecture, and its transition from the preceding style. This was comparatively easy; but to describe it when it had attained perfection is far less so.