They adopt for type, not the plain half-circle of the arcade, or the simple angle formed by the column and the architrave, but the complicated union of two curves intersected by each other, forming the ogive. They aspire to the gigantic, covering square acres of ground with piles of stone, binding pillars together in monstrous columns, suspending galleries in the air, elevating arches to the skies, and stage upon stage of belfry until their spires are lost in the clouds. They exaggerate the delicacy of forms; they surround doors with series of statuettes, and festoon the sides with trefoils, gables and gargoyles; they interlace the tortuous tracery of mullions with the motley hues of stained glass; the choir seems to be embroidered with lace, while tombs, altars, stalls and towers are covered with mazes of slender columns and fringes of leaves and statues. It seems as if they wished to attain at once infinite grandeur and infinite littleness, seeking to overwhelm the mind on either side, on the one hand with the vastness of a mass, and on the other with a prodigious quantity of details. Their object was evidently to produce an extraordinary sensation; they aimed to dazzle and bewilder. Proportionately, therefore, to the development of this style of architecture, it becomes more and more paradoxical. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the age of the flamboyant Gothic of Strasburg, Milan, York, Nuremburg, and the Church of Brou, solidity seems to have been wholly abandoned for ornament. At one time it bristles with a profusion of multiplied and superposed pinnacles; at another its exterior is draped with a lacework of mouldings. Walls are hollowed out, and almost wholly absorbed by windows; they lack strength, and without the buttresses raised against them the structure would fall; ever disintegrating, it is necessary to establish colonies of masons about them constantly to repair their constant decay. This embroidered stonework, more and more frail as it ascends the spire, cannot sustain itself; it has to be fastened to a skeleton of iron, and as iron rusts, the blacksmith is summoned to contribute his share towards propping up this unstable, delusive magnificence. In the interior the decoration is so exuberant and complex, the groinings so richly display their thorny and tangled vegetation, and the stalls, pulpit, and railings, swarm with such intricate, tortuous, fantastic arabesques, that the church no longer seems to be a sacred monument, but a rare example of the jewellers art. It is a vast structure of variegated glass, a gigantic piece of filigree work, a festive decoration as elaborated as that of a queen or a bride; it is the adornment of a nervous, over-excited woman, similar to the extravagant costumes of the day, whose delicate and morbid poesy denotes by its excess the singular sentiments, the feverish, violent, and impotent aspiration peculiar to an age of knights and monks.