The sad thing is that these revived ornamental forms were only a travesty of the old. Gothic architecture was, perhaps, the highest form of natural and legitimate building that the world has ever seen: as adapted by the speculative builder, it had no structural meaning whatsoever, and consisted in mere chunks of crudely caricatured ornament, generally misapplied. Ruskin preached truth and honesty in architecture; but his pigmy disciples missed the whole spirit of Gothic. The barns and cottages of old England represent that spirit as well as the French cathedrals and Venetian palaces on which he concentrated with such disastrous effect, yet the English village has suffered terribly from the Gothic revival. For the movement spread to village shops and banks, and, of course, all new churches erected after 1830, or even earlier, followed the new fashion. Because every old village already possessed a parish church, now becoming too large for its needs, there was little for the Church of England to do outside the towns, though there are many cases such as that at M---- in Middlesex, where an amateur effort in church-design by the saintly William Wilberforce, just a century ago, has ruined a beautiful old village highway. But the Nonconformist bodies, now flourishing and sometimes even wealthy, were not to be outdone in the race: so they abandoned the stark galleried chapels, that had hitherto followed the Protestant type invented by Wren for his City churches, for an ambitious and often flamboyant variety of “Gothic” that has created a discord in many a village street. There seems to have been a prevalent idea that every place of worship must be decorated with a spire, with tracery, and with a quantity of ornamental features, quite regardless as to whether funds permitted of a single one of those features being worthily executed, whether any of them symbolised the entirely English and healthy movement that produced Nonconformity, or whether they harmonised with surrounding buildings. Our final conclusion must be that the Gothic Revival, which, in the hands of a man like William Morris, who loved England passionately, might have done so much to save her countryside, was in fact largely responsible for its defacement.