THE GOTHIC STYLE. THE CASTLE CHARACTER requires massive walls, with very small windows, if any are allowed to appear externally. The correct imitation of this, in modern times, must produce the effect of a prison. The ABBEY CHARACTER requires lofty and large apertures, almost equally inapplicable to a house, although, in some few rooms, the excess of light may be subdued by coloured glass. But in the Abbey Character it is only the chapel, the collegiate church, the hall, and the library, which furnish models for a palace; all the subordinate parts were the mean habitation of monks, or students, built on so small a scale, and with such low ceilings, that they cannot be imitated in a modern palace, without such mixture and modification as tend to destroy the original character; therefore, it is necessary now (as it was formerly) to adopt the MIXED STYLE of Queen Elizabeth's Gothic, for modern palaces, if they must be in any style of what is called GOTHIC. Yet, a mixed style is generally imperfect: the mind is not easily reconciled to the combination of forms which it has been used to consider distinct, and at variance with each other: it feels an incongruity of character, like an anachronism in the confusion of dates; it is like uniting, in one object, infancy with old age, life with death, or things present with things past.
