It is the first considerable building which has for centuries been erected in England according to the true principles of Gothic Art. It is a revival of the spirit and freedom of Gothic architecture. It is no copy, but an original creation of thought, fancy, and imagination. It has combined beauty with use, elegance with convenience, and ornament with instruction. It has proved the perfect pliancy of Gothic architecture to modern needs, and shown its power of entire adaptation to the requirements of new conditions. In its details no less than in its general scope it exhibits the recognition by its builders of the essential characteristics of the best Gothic Art, and shows in the harmonized variety of its parts the inventive thought and the independent execution of many minds and hands presided over by a single will. Gothic architecture in its best development is the expression at once of law and of liberty. The exactest principles of proportion are combined in it with the freest play of fancy. Its spaces are divided mathematically by the rule and the square, its main lines are determined with absolute precision,--but within these limits of order the imagination works out its free results, and, because limited by mathematical laws, reaches the most perfect freedom of beauty.
But the system of Gothic decorations, "which," says Mr. Ruskin, "took eight hundred years to mature, gathering its power by undivided inheritance of traditional method," is not an easy thing to revive under new and difficult conditions. A single example of what has been attempted in this way in the Oxford Museum must suffice to show the spirit which pervades its construction. The lower arcade upon the central court is supported by thirty-three piers and thirty shafts; the upper arcade by thirty-three piers and ninety-five shafts. "The shafts have been carefully selected, under the direction of the Professor of Geology, from quarries which furnish examples of many of the most important rocks of the British Islands. On the lower arcade are placed, on the west side, the granitic series; on the east, the metamorphic; on the north, calcareous rocks, chiefly from Ireland; on the south, the marbles of England." The capitals and bases are to represent different groups of plants and animals, illustrating the various geological epochs, and the natural orders of existence. Thus, the column of sienite from Charnwood Forest has a capital of the cocoa palm; the red granite of Ross, in Mull, is crowned with a capital of lilies; the beautiful marble of Marychurch has an exquisitely sculptured capital of ferns;--and so through all the range of the arcades, new designs, studied directly from Nature, and combining art with science, have been executed by the workmen employed on the building.