Most of all does one notice the change of mental attitude. The fierce missionary zeal for the Faith, the mystic symbolism, has gone. The wonderful two hundred years which produced St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. Dominic, St. Louis and the Crusades, and which saw most of the great cathedrals built are over, and a reaction sets in. Never again do we find a whole people, from princes to ploughmen, neglecting their personal affairs and combining to build and decorate worthily a glorious house of God. Churchmen are growing comfortable and apathetic, if not corrupt, and laymen are either uninterested in religion or critical. Towards the end of the century this feeling gives rise to Wyclif's movement and we get _Piers Plowman_, with its fierce denunciation of the means by which money was obtained for windows and of "lordings" who "writen in windowes of their well deedes." With the religious motive thus weakened the artist seems to have interested himself chiefly in the technical side of his art,--he may even have talked of "Art for Art's sake,"--and the usual result follows. The lack of the underlying and unifying motive produces a want of proportion in the parts. The canopies become much more important than the figures under them; narrative subjects become much more rare, and when they occur have none of the dramatic intensity of those of the past age. Instead we have an endless series of single figures of saints, without character and each in exactly the same affected attitude, like an elongated letter S. In search of inspiration the artist turns to the study of nature and the literal reproduction of plant forms in ornament. In the figures too, although the attitudes are conventional the drawing of drapery is less so, and towards the end of the period the artist is tentatively feeling his way towards modelling. [Sidenote: Progress in technique.] One thing indeed we find during this time, which is within the power of every artist in times of artistic dearth, namely, a steady grappling with practical problems offered by the changed conditions, whereby the way was cleared for the new life that came into the art in the succeeding age. For instance, by showing how coloured figure work could be combined with grisaille in the same window they solved the problem of lighting; by the invention of the silver stain they made it possible to make white glass more interesting and to blend it better with colour; while in drawing they made steady progress towards a style more in keeping with the standards of the time. [Sidenote: Characteristics.] The outward and visible characteristics of this period as compared with the preceding one are as follows:--