glory were developing daily, the statute of Mortmain began to tell upon the Church: {cxxiv} and though the impulse already given yet continued for some time to act, the end was near. No magnificent cathedral was built after the full effects--not so much of that act, as of the Erastianism which contrived and allowed it--were felt. The nave of Winchester can hardly be called a solitary exception; because, in truth, it may be doubted whether the pious exertions of William of Wykeham were not, so far as concerns the actual beauty of his cathedral, misplaced. Thenceforward, the State interfered more and more with the Church; and not allowed to carry out her own designs, it is no wonder if the latter quickly began to forget her own symbolical language. After, for the first few years of the fourteenth century, using it with precision and elegance before unattainable, she thenceforward began to disuse it. We need not give examples of decorated symbolism, because all that was new in it lay in its windows: and these we have already discussed at considerable length. And having sufficiently explained why there should be a decline, we have only now to examine why that decline should have been so different in England, France, and Italy. In England, from the time that Edward IV directed the execution of Archbishop Scrope, when the State interfered, it was with a strong arm, cramping and confining, obliging the Church to confine herself to ritual observances, and forbidding her to expatiate in the grand objects for which she was ordained. Now could there be a more fitting expression of this than the Perpendicular style? Does not its stiffness, its failure in harmony, its want of power and adaptation, its continual introduction of heraldry, its monotony, its breaking up by hard continued lines, its shallowness, its meretriciousness, its display--set forth what we know to have been the character of the contemporary Church? {cxxv } Above all, do not the reintroduction of Horizontality, the Tudor arch, the depressed pier, speak of her want of spirituality? Everything teaches us that there was no want of power in her architects; considered merely as specimens of art, King's College, and Henry the Seventh's chapels, are matchless. And here and there we may trace some tokens of vastness and holiness of conception worthy of a better age; such as the Suffolk roofs, which, as it has been well said, never attained their full development. It must be borne in mind, that Perpendicular [Footnote 78] was the first style, which in its full development was used first for a secular building. Far be it from us, however, to depreciate the excessive magnificence it assumes in shrines and chapels: indeed, this is one of the features which Decorated has not, and the absence of which in that style renders it possible to believe that a still more magnificent may be in store for us. Perpendicular introduced no new element of symbolism.