It is doubtless true that many of the works of the ninth and tenth centuries were but feeble imitations of the buildings of Charlemagne, but it is also true that the period was that which was bringing about the development of a more or less distinct style, and if the Romanesque churches of France were not wholly Roman in spirit they were at least not a debasement therefrom. Sir Walter Scott has also described the Romanesque manner of church-building most poetically, as witness the following quatrain: "Built ere the art was known By pointed aisle and shafted stalk The arcades of an alleyed walk To emulate in stone." However, little remains in church architecture of the pre-tenth century to compare with the grand theatres, arenas, monuments, arches, towers, and bridges which are still left to us. Hence comparison were futile. Furthermore, there is this patent fact to be reckoned with, that the petty followers of the magnificent Charlemagne were not endowed with as luxurious a taste, as large a share of riches, or so great a power; and naturally they fell before the idea they would have emulated. As a whole France was at this period amid great consternation and bloodshed, and traces of advancing civilization were fast falling before wars and cruelties unspeakable. There came a period when the intellect, instead of pursuing its rise, was, in reality, degenerating into the darkness of superstition. The church architecture of this period--so hostile to the arts and general enlightenment--was undergoing a process even more fatal to its development than the terrors of war or devastation. It is a commonplace perhaps to repeat that it was the superstition aroused by the Apocalypse that the end of all things would come with the commencement of the eleventh century. It was this, however, that produced the stagnation in church-building which even the ardour of a few believing churchmen could not allay. The only great religious foundation of the time was the Abbey of Cluny in the early years of the tenth century. When the eleventh century actually arrived, Christians again bestirred themselves, and the various cities and provinces vied with each other in their enthusiastic devotion to church-building, as if to make up for lost time. From this time onward the art of church-building gave rise to that higher skill and handicraft, the practice of architecture as an art, of which ecclesiastical art, as was but natural, rose to the greatest height. The next century was productive of but little change in style, and, though in the north the transition and the most primitive of Gothic were slowly creeping in, the well-defined transition did not come until well forward in the twelfth century, when, so soon after, the new style bloomed forth in all its perfected glory.