at the summit, would exultingly curl themselves together in the most precious cruciforms.  Quaint spire-lights began to appear.  Sometimes curious dormers would project from alternate sides; and the very ribs, as if, in this spring-time of Art, they felt, quickening along their lengths, the mysterious movements of a new life, sprouted out here and there with knots of leafage, timidly at first, and then with all the wealth and profusion of the harvest.  The same impulse wreathed the crowning cross with a thousand midsummer fancies, till the circle of Eternity, or the triangle of Trinity, which often mingled with its arms, scarcely knew itself.  The pinnacles, too, blossomed into crockets and bud-like finials, and began to gather more thickly about the roots of the spire, and from them often leaped flying-buttresses against it.  During this time the spire itself was growing more and more acute, its lines becoming more and more eloquent.  After the fourteenth century, the tower began to be crowned with intricate panelled tracery of parapets and battlements, from behind which the spire, an entirely separate structure, shot up into the sky.  In this, the period of the perpendicular style, pinnacles, purfled to the last degree, crowded about the base of the spire, reminding one of the admiring throng gathered about the base of some old picture of the Ascension.  But there is another English form which perhaps conveys this sentiment even more impressively:  We refer to that whose prototype exists in the steeple of the Church of St. Nicholas at Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  This, however, has four turrets, one on each angle, from which, with great lightness, leap towards each other four grand flying-buttresses, which join hands over an empty void and hold in the air a lantern and spirolet of great elegance.  This is a very bold piece of construction.  It has been imitated at St. Giles’s, Edinburgh, at Linlithgow, in the college tower of Aberdeen, and it is especially made known to the world by Sir Christopher Wren’s famous use of it in the steeple of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East, London.

The most famous spires of England and Normandy are St. Peter’s at Caen, a very early specimen, St. Michael’s at Coventry, Louth, that of the parochial church of Boston in Lincolnshire, that of Chichester Cathedral, the three that rise from the famous Lichfield Cathedral, and finally and especially the magnificent spire over the cross of Salisbury.  In the judgment of most English connoisseurs, this is the finest in the world.  It was probably erected during the reign of Edward III., a very florid period for architecture.  It is the highest in England, its summit rising four hundred and four feet from the pavement of the church beneath.  It is one of the earliest erected in stone, and is remarkable for skilful construction, the masonry in no part being more than seven inches thick.  This spire is belted with three broad bands of panelled tracery, and there are eight pinnacles at its base, two on each corner