Time would fail me to illustrate the magnificent combinations of this early class of window to be found in cathedrals and monastic churches--as the east end of Ely, the west at Llandaff, or the north transept at York; nor would it be possible to enumerate the simple and impressive village churches to which, in their humbler forms, though with equal artistic merit, they lend such a charm. The style is too well known in England to need minute description, and its merits too fully acknowledged to need enforcement from me. I will rather proceed to consider that great invention which may be considered to complete the series of developments which constituted Pointed architecture: I mean the mullioned and traceried window; not that I consider it as in all points better than its predecessor, nor that in our own revival it should supersede it; but that, as a matter of fact, Gothic architecture would have been imperfect without it. Like almost every other feature of Pointed architecture, the traceried window grew out of the Romanesque. In all periods of Romanesque we find occasionally two or more arched openings comprised under one enclosing arch. The arrangement is more frequent in belfry windows and triforium openings than elsewhere, but occurs in ordinary windows, especially in secular buildings. The space intervening between the large arch and the two or more placed below it was, even as early as this, occasionally pierced with circles or other forms of opening. Here, then, we have the elements of the mullioned window before even the introduction of the pointed arch. In the same situations it gradually developed itself, step by step, during the Early Pointed period, so that we have in triforium arcades and in other positions a pretty full development of what is called _plate_ tracery before its use became frequent for ordinary windows. The case was pretty much the same both in France and England, though on the whole the love of placing two openings under one arch was greater in France; thus, we see in the aisles at Chartres two plain lights under one arch with a circular opening, and above, in the clerestory, a very large circle in the head with somewhat complex subordinate piercings. The same is the case at Bourges, where three lights are often comprised under one arch, with a single circle in the head.