(4) _The Extraordinary Development of the Canopy._--As we have seen, single figures in the preceding period, even at Canterbury, usually had architectural canopies of an unobtrusive kind, of similar design to the sculptured niches which sheltered the statues on the outside of the building. The motive for their adoption by the glazier at this date is not very obvious. They do not in the Early Period form a very important feature in the design, and serve no decorative purpose that the artist could not equally well have attained by the flat ornamentation of which he was a master. However, the glazier seems to have liked the idea when he saw it in stone-work, where it had a practical object, and to have imported it into his own work, where it had none. It must be remembered that when the sculpture was painted in colours, as it was then, the resemblance between it and the stained glass would have been closer than it is now. However this may be, the canopy in the thirteenth century was a comparatively unobtrusive object, but in the fourteenth century, as the sculptured canopy grew and developed, so did its counterpart in stained glass, till the stained-glass worker seems to have run canopy mad. Not only is it now found over single figures but over subjects too. It is true there was now a certain practical reason for the tall canopy to be found in the tall and narrow shape of the lights that had to be filled. The human figure was very short and broad in proportion to them, and when it was a case of a group the resulting shape was shorter still, so the canopy offered a convenient way of elongating the design; but the fourteenth century designer developed it, as may be seen in the illustrations, out of all reason, filling it with fantastic detail--angels looking out of the windows, birds perching on the pinnacles, and miniature figures standing like statues in the niches of it--till it quite reduced the figures below it to insignificance. In doing so he was only following the rest of the artistic world, which had all gone wild over the new style of architecture,--with its "passion of pinnacle and fret," as Ruskin called it,--using its details as motives for ornament even where they were least appropriate; but all this expenditure of effort on fantastic and irrelevant detail is really a symptom of the weakening of interest in the principal theme, of which a further sign is the uninteresting treatment of the subjects themselves. The fourteenth century canopy is, at first at least, always in pure elevation, attempts at perspective not being found till close on the end of the century. Plate XXV. shows both of the forms which are most commonly found, that with a single big crocketted gable and arch spanning the opening, and that with three small ones. I think the former is the earlier form, but they are often, as here, found together. [Sidenote: The base.]