Before proceeding to consider the Norman and Moresque styles, a word should be said about that portion of Gothic decoration which does not directly help the main effect of aspiration--namely, cusped and foliated tracery, diaper-work, the foliage of spandrels, etc. etc. Kugler says: “This filling-in appears as a peculiar sort of architecture of independent signification.” He does not, however, give the interpretation which he sees to be required. Yet there is an interpretation which only needs to be put in words to be obvious to every eye which has made itself familiar with these objects. In exact proportion to the recognised perfection of these details, as it was attained in the middle or “decorated” period of pointed architecture, they become expressions of an idea almost identical with that which has been traced in the mode by which contented suspension or delay of the infinitely aspiring character in the main lines of the building is conveyed. As the inexhaustible torrent of upward life is checked peacefully, but with no denial of infinite _potential_ aspiration, in the square-headed tower, so the same reconciliation of life with law without the least detriment to either--that reconciliation which is the consummation of Christianity--is expressed even more completely in the more essentially decorative details of pointed architecture. It is in the treatment of foliage that this character can be most easily traced, and this can be done best by comparing it with other modes of treatment. By the Greek architect this and other natural objects, when wanted for ornament, were what is called “conventionalised”; honeysuckles, roses, and waves of the sea were represented by certain formal figures which suited the lines of the architecture, and were not too much like nature to attract attention from those all-important lines to themselves. In the Italian Gothic, again, such natural objects are represented as nearly as possible like nature, but with such slight modifications and arrangements as were necessary to give them the consciousness of art. This is the sort of imitation which Mr. Ruskin recommends, and into which the northern Gothic fell in the decay of the art. But in fourteenth-century Gothic--that is to say, in the Gothic which was as much superior to that of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries as the art of Athens was superior to that of Pæstum or Rome--nature was neither imitated nor conventionalised. The special aim of the fourteenth-century ornamentation is to show a vigorous life playing with perfect freedom in severely geometrical forms--with freedom so perfect that it is difficult to say whether the life shapes the law or the law the life. This highly and essentially symbolic character is the most marked expression of Gothic tracery. In its decay it took the form of licence and weakness in the French “flamboyant,” and of hardness and rigidity in the English “perpendicular”; the life prevailing--to its own destruction--in the