From this curious notice it would seem that the Earl was himself the chief designer and architect to whose ingenuity and inventive skill we owe the remarkable and unique example of masonic art which still remains at Roslin. Nor is this at all improbable. He was devoted to building, in an age in which it became one of the most favourite pastimes, and indeed engrossing pursuits of the Scottish kings. The Saint Clairs continued, according to some authorities, from this early date to be recognised as the chiefs of the whole body of Scottish Free Masons, till in 1736 William St. Clair, Esq. of Rosslyn, resigned into the hands of the Scottish lodges the hereditary office of Grand Master, which, however, he continued to hold till his death. The evidence of the creation of this office in the person of the founder of the collegiate church of Roslin is defective, and the entire narrative of Father Hay must be received with caution, though professedly derived from original manuscripts. Of the existence, however, of the hereditary office of Grand Master in the younger branch of the St. Clairs, which terminated on the death of William St. Clair of Rosslyn in 1778, there can be no question; and of the early connexion of the St. Clairs with the masonic fraternity, there seems equally little reason to doubt. On this account, therefore, the set of mason-marks given above from the remarkable memorial of their masonic skill which still exists at Roslin, possesses peculiar interest. While, however, we find in Father Hay's curious notice that artificers were brought from foreign kingdoms, that is not to be misunderstood as indicating that either the design or entire execution of this remarkable edifice is to be ascribed to a foreign guild. The same was done by Wykeham, in order to secure the perfect execution of his own magnificent designs, and in one or two of the mason-marks the additions may be traced which probably indicate the admission of a stranger using, with a difference, the symbol already belonging to some brother of the local guild. The very small number of varieties, however, is remarkable, though it of course only embraces one class of the numerous artificers employed. The conclusions indicated by the traditions of the craft, and the direct evidence which their works supply, seem equally opposed to the ideas too hastily adopted by some enthusiastic elucidators of medieval free masonry, that travelling lodges continued to perambulate Europe, devoting their artistic skill to supply the wants of the universal church, so that we might look for precisely the same details being repeated in contemporary works of the Norman architects of Sicily and of the Orkney Islands, or of Drontheim. We do indeed find in the eighth century the Pictish king sending for builders to rear a fitting edifice at Abernethy after the Roman manner, and, to the last, skilled artificers were doubtless sought far and near—with the ready facilities for foreign correspondence which the Church then exclusively possessed—whenever any work of unusual importance was to be executed; but long before the sons of St. Margaret had commenced their magnificent foundations, the corresponding demands for the aid of the free mason in every country of Christendom had removed all necessity for the maintenance of peripatetic missionary guilds. The order, however, flourished under this abundant patronage; nor did the localization of its guilds interrupt that mutual recognition of members of the privileged fraternity by means of which Gothic architecture continued for upwards of four hundred years to be a living art, expanding and developing itself under ever varying but progressive forms of fitness and beauty.

We have witnessed in our own day an attempt to resuscitate medieval architecture by a retrogression altogether opposed to the spirit of the old builders, in whose hands it grew like a thing of life that returns not upon the work of earlier years. Its results have been of value in securing the restoration of many crumbling memorials of the past; and in Scotland our best architects have yet much to learn in the same reverent spirit, ere we can hope to see our national historic monuments of medieval art preserved, instead of being defaced and obliterated by the superinduction of spurious French or Anglo-Gothic details—a restoration that "means the most total destruction which a building can suffer; a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed."[660] But a national style of architecture was never reproduced by such means. It must grow up like the oak, unforced and in its native soil; and, when thus originating, its living forms become the embodiment of the polity, social history, and religious faith of the nation. Yet architecture is on this very account essentially a practical art, and even in the most gorgeous medieval cathedral a sense of fitness, and ideas of direct utility, may be traced as controlling powers influencing the whole design. From this overruling utilitarian spirit sprang the element of picturesqueness, which we look for in vain in modern Gothic. The old cathedral or abbey has here a chapter-house, there a transept or cloister, a chantry chapel, vestry, or porch, introduced simply because it was required, though harmonized with all the skill of a perfect artist into an integral part of the architectural design. In the modern Gothic everything is balanced, proportioned, and reduced to strict rule and formality, but it is lifeless as the men of the old centuries to which it properly belongs. As to modern Protestant cathedrals, with "long-drawn aisles," constructed for no possible end connected with the worship for which they profess to be designed, they are manifest absurdities, which proclaim the lifelessness of the art in which they have originated. The national peculiarities traceable in medieval architecture are among the most remarkable evidences that it was a living art. Like a transplanted flower, it was modified everywhere by the soil and climate: the classic elements which are seen pervading that of Italy; the substantial yet ornate but impure grandeur of that of Spain; the compact, consistent, harmonious completeness of that of Germany; the rich but lawless exuberance of the French Flamboyant; the stately progression of the beautiful English Decorated into the profusely overlaid, yet still strictly defined Perpendicular; and the massive but comparatively plain and unchanging Scottish Decorated—all manifest peculiarities which pertain to the several nations with which they originated. "The essential modifications of architecture in each age and country must depend in part on the natural materials, localities, and in part on the artificial forms, social, civil, and religious, on the acquired habits and manners of the peculiar nation for which it labours, and the changes in these must produce corresponding variations in architecture."[661] The revivalist who seeks to reproduce the creations of the past in defiance of these manifest laws by which they existed in harmony and just adaptation to their geographical or social adjuncts, will find his self-imposed task not much less hopeless than to reanimate the fossil Mastodon or Dinotherium. But meanwhile the geologist, without seeking to reanimate these extinct vertebrata, learns much regarding the past from the investigation of their colossal remains, and so too may the archæologist see into the living spirit of the medieval era by the earnest study of its creations, though he hopes better things of his own age than that it should expect perfection in those immature centuries, or seek for life in the beautiful sepulchres wherein they lie entombed.

The consecutive view given above of the progressive development of the various styles of ecclesiastical architecture, accompanied as it is with some few elements for the construction of a chronological series of examples, is sufficient, at least, to bear out the views advanced in reference to the independent character and individuality of Scottish Ecclesiology. It would be easy to multiply references to examples of the various peculiar features referred to, but what is far more wanted is the ascertainment of a larger number of well authenticated dates of existing work. Even of the cathedrals and great abbeys scarcely anything is known, though now that so many of the Scottish chartularies are published, and as a valuable adjunct to them, their seals are being systematically described, we may hope to discover, by a comparison with the armorial sculpture of our ecclesiastical structures, a sufficient number of dated examples by which to test the whole. Meanwhile, the following table is offered with great diffidence, and merely as some probable approximation to the true chronological arrangement of the Scottish styles, placing alongside of it the English classification of Rickman, as adopted with some later modifications, in the Fifth Edition of the Glossary of Architecture, to shew the extent of coincidence or disagreement. I shall be glad to find it speedily superseded by a system much more complete; but anything which supplies the elements of a recognised nomenclature and orderly classification will be of some use as a help towards cooperation among Scottish ecclesiologists. The styles distinguished here as First-pointed and Geometric are to some extent synchronous, depending perhaps on the native or foreign education of the ecclesiastics by whom the works were prosecuted;—a remarkable circumstance, and probably without a parallel in the history of medieval art. We find William de Bondington of Glasgow, for example, in the last year of his episcopate, adopting the ritual and customs of Sarum as the constitution of his cathedral.[662] It need not therefore excite our surprise to find the portion of the nave executed under his superintendence bearing an equally close affinity to the Sarum model, then in progress. Scottish First-pointed differs very little from the Early English, whereas the Scottish Geometric has no parallel elsewhere, and in Scotland entirely superseded the other at a very early date. It is, therefore, manifestly indispensable to the prosecution of Scottish Ecclesiology, that what is peculiar to it shall receive a nomenclature of its own. It can only lead to uncertainty and confusion to continue to apply the term First-pointed[663] to such work as the east end of St. Magnus's Cathedral, where not only the pier and triforium arches are semicircular, but even the arch of the great east window is filled in with a rose of twelve leaves, and being left unpierced above, it is practically a round-headed light. A much more elaborate treatment of the subject would be necessary than is possible within the limits of a single chapter, in order to shew the peculiar mouldings and other characteristic details. In the Scottish Decorated, for example, cylindrical and octagonal piers are by no means uncommon; both pier arches and windows are very frequently composed simply of two or three plain chamfer orders. Square-edged hood-mouldings and string-courses are also common; and in the more ornamental piers the double-roll, and the roll and fillet mouldings almost invariably predominate. In the windows also—among the most expressive features of every style of Gothic architecture—one harmonious feeling is observable throughout the endless varieties of tracery, giving to them a national aspect not less marked than the physiognomy of their builders. The most prevailing characteristics are well represented in the example figured above, from one of the beautiful series of St. Michael's, Linlithgow. Similar windows, though varying in detail, occur at St. Monance, Fife, St. Mary's, Leith, at Mid-Calder and Duddingston, in the Abbey Church, Haddington, in the collegiate churches of Seton, Crichton, and Roslin, in Melrose Abbey, and the ancient church tower of Dundee. They also existed in both the collegiate churches of St. Giles and the Holy Trinity at Edinburgh; and are even found amid the traces of declining art in the beautiful chapels of King's College, Aberdeen, and Heriot's Hospital, Edinburgh—the latter of which has been assigned, without a shadow of evidence, as the work of Inigo Jones, the architect having in reality been William Wallace, styled in the treasurer's accounts and other authentic documents relating to its erection, by the old name of Master Mason. Such are some of the genuine characteristics of our native styles; but at Dunfermline, Dunblane, Corstorphine, or wherever the hand of the modern restorer has been, we find them displaced by perpendicular tracery, English mouldings and details, and the like evidences of irreverent ignorance.

MEDIEVAL ECCLESIOLOGY