“The small lights in the upper field enlarge and multiply until they form a connected pattern which fills its whole area, and the jambs of the main lights diminish into narrow strips or very slender columns. The great arch, which in the first place did but encircle the windows, thus becomes itself the window――the ‘plate-traceried’ window which was richly developed in early French Gothic, but less richly in English, owing to the persistent local love for mere groups of lancets. Then all the stone-work shrinks still farther――the columnar character of the uprights is lost, and the flat surfaces between the upper openings change into mouldings of complex section. Thus the original tall lights and upper piercings surrender their last claim to independence; the uprights are no longer jambs or bits of wall but mullions, the arch-head is filled with genuine traceries, and all the elements of the design are vitally fused together within the sweep of the great window to form its multiple yet organic beauty.” The art of making stained glass windows went hand in hand with this development of architectural forms through the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and succeeding centuries. It has indeed been called the “principal branch of Mediæval Art;” but was always treated as absolutely subservient to the particular architecture itself. A most eminent authority denies that the art of glass-staining has ever been lost. Glass itself was used by Christians in their churches from the earliest church-building times; the distinct art of painting on glass emerges, one might say, with the springing up of pointed architecture, though the beginnings show themselves in Norman architecture in the eleventh century. Four centuries the two arts flourished side by side; with the decadence of the greater came also the decline of the subsidiary; a poorer taste in building was naturally accompanied by a poorer taste in glass. With the revival of interest in those long-neglected periods of noble achievement, the Oxford movement of Church Restoration giving men the religious guiding principles for an intelligent appreciation of the forms of Mediæval art, church building and glass staining were brought back again, the one with the other. And whether such restoration can leave us satisfied with the mere recovery of the riches of by-gone ages, or must mean also, as I believe, the development of what the present can contribute in a reverent but not slavish spirit――certain it is that the first step is to understand the past, to find out what was done in the great formative and classic periods, why it was done as it was and not otherwise, in a word, to master the models before we proceed on our own course; and, as I said before, to remember to which period and style our own edifice belongs.