Note 229 — Chapter XI · TOLEDO.

I venture to speak with great positiveness about some features of detail. It is possible enough that architects in various countries may develop from one original—say from a Lombard original—groups of buildings which shall have a general similarity. They may increase this similarity by travel. But in each country certain conventionalities have been introduced in the designing of details which it is most rare to see anywhere out of the country which produced them. Such, e.g., are the delicate differences between the French and English bases of the thirteenth century, nay even between the bases in various parts of the present French empire. These differences are so delicate that it is all but impossible to explain them; yet no one who has carefully studied them will doubt, when he sees a French moulding used throughout a building, that French artists had much to do with its design.