The round archways in the cloisters show how splendid Furness Abbey would have been with its original design. But the old church-builders never knew when to stop: they ran after all the latest fashions in design, and in fact were out (as we should say) to beat the record. Their flying-buttresses were towers of force: at least, a verger told me that a bishop said so. But their biggest efforts often failed--Amiens Cathedral looks all right when you see it from the triforium, but you generally see it from the floor, and then it looks too high. And there were many problems that they never solved at all: for instance, they built naves like tunnels and just walled them up at the west end, whereas a nave requires a narthex or an apse or some such thing to terminate it. Gothic is never at its best except in ruins--Chartres does not equal Tintern--and I have felt this even here. Lower Wreyland is an ordinary bit of cottage architecture; but there was no roof on the north end of it for several weeks in 1901, and then it looked quite grand with a granite gable standing out against the sky, and moonlight streaming through the empty windows. One’s appreciation of a building will always be affected by the atmosphere in which one may have seen it. In going up the Nile in 1882 my boat stuck in the mud close by Kom Ombo on a brilliant moonlight night; and I thought the temple there as beautiful a thing as I had ever seen, but changed my mind on seeing it by daylight as I came down stream. So also at Granada, I was once in the Alhambra on a rainy day, 22 September 1877, and could hardly believe it was the building that looked so like a fairy palace when I had seen it in the scorching sun. And with some pictures also, such as Tintoretto’s _Bacchus and Ariadne_ in the Doge’s Palace or Michaelangelo’s _Last Judgement_ in the Sistine Chapel, there is no life or beauty in them unless the sun is strong enough to bring the colouring out. We have not sun enough in England to justify the use of Classic architecture or Palladian. These styles demand the glare of Greece and Italy; and sometimes that is not enough--in bleak places, such as Phigaleia or Segesta, I have found the old Greek temples too austere without their ancient colouring. However, these styles are now established here; and the only consolation is that they are all reduced to rule, so that ambitious architects do not come to grief with them as badly as with Gothic.