Nor is there any ground for saying that the fault is in the builders,--that the old builders met the demands of their time, and would equally satisfy the demands of our time, without sacrifice of their art. The first demand in the days of good architecture was, that the building should have an independent artistic value beyond its use. This is what architecture requires; for architecture is building, _pure_,--building for its own sake, not as means. What Mr. Garbett says is, no doubt, quite true,--that nothing was ever made, for taste's sake, less efficient than it might have been. But many things were made _more_ efficient than they might have been; or, rather, this is always the character of good architecture. It is in this surplus of perfection, above bare necessity, that its claim to rank among the fine arts consists. This character the builders of the good times, accordingly, never left out of sight; so that, if their means were limited, they lavished all upon one point,--made that overflow with riches, and left the rest plain and bare; never did they spread their pittance thin to cover the whole, as we do. It is for this reason that so few of the great cathedrals were finished, and that in buildings of all kinds we so often find the decoration in patches, sharply marked off from the rest of the structure. This noble profuseness is not, indeed, necessarily decoration; the essence of it is an independent value and interest in the building, aside from the temporary and accidental employment. The spires and the flying-buttresses of the Northern cathedrals cannot be defended on the ground of thrifty construction. The Italian churches accomplished that as well without either. How remote the reference to use in the mighty portals of Rheims, or the soaring vaultings of Amiens and Beauvais! Does anybody suppose that Michel Angelo, when he undertook to raise the dome of the Pantheon into the air, was thinking of the most economical way of roofing a given space? These fine works have their whole value as expression; it is with their visible contempt of thrift that our admiration begins. They pared away the stone to the minimum that safety demanded, and beyond it,--yet not from thrift, but to make the design more preëminent and necessary, and to owe as little as possible to the inert strength of the material.