The Gothic architecture of the early part of the fifteenth century was ripe for the spirit of healthy reform.  It had been actively accumulating, during the progress of the age of Christianity, a boundless wealth of forms, a vast amount of constructive resources, and material fit for innumerable architectural expressions of human power.  But in the last two centuries of this era the Love which gave life to this architecture in its earlier developments gradually became swallowed up in the Pride of the workman; and the luscious and abandoned luxury of line led it farther and farther astray from the true path, till at last it became like an unweeded garden run to seed, and there was no health in it.  In the year 1555, at Beauvais, the masonic workmen uttered their last cry of defiance against the old things made new in Italy.  Jean Wast and Francois Marechal of that town, two cathedral-builders, said,—­“that they had heard of the Church of St. Peter at Rome, and would maintain that their Gothic could be built as high and on as grand a scale as the antique orders of this Michel Angelo.”  And with this spirit they built a wonderful pyramid over the cross of their cathedral.  But, alas! it fell in the fifth year of its arrogant pride, and this is the last we hear of Gothic architecture in those times.  Over the wild and picturesque ruins the spirits of the old conquerors of Gaul once more strode with measured tread, and began to set up their prevailing standards in the very strongholds of Gothic supremacy.  These conquerors trampled down the true as well as the false in the Mediaeval regime, and utterly extinguished that sole lamp of knowledge which had given light to the Ages of Darkness and had kindled into life and beauty the cathedrals of Europe.

This was the error of the Renaissance.  Its apostles would not recognize the capacities existing in the great architecture they displaced, for opening into a new life under the careful culture of a revived knowledge.  But they rooted it out bodily, and planted instead an exotic of the schools.  It was the re-birth of an Art system, which in its former existence had developed in an atmosphere of conquest.  It taught them to kill, burn, and destroy all that opposed the progress of its triumph.  It was eminently revolutionary in its character, and its reign, to all those multitudinous expressions of life and thought which had arisen under the intermediate and more liberal dynasty, was one of terror.  Truly, it was a fierce and desolating instrument of reform.

It would be a tempting theme of speculation to follow in the imagination the probable progress of a Greek, instead of a Roman Renaissance, into such active, but misguided schools as those of Rouen and Tours in the latter part of the fifteenth century,—­of Rouen, with its Roger Arge, its brothers Leroux, who built the old and famous Hotel Bourgtheroulde there, its Pierre de Saulbeaux, and all that legion of architects