things went their merry way, straight on, "ça allait, ça ira," to the merriest days of the guillotine.1

But they could still carve, in the fourteenth century, and the Madonna and her hawthorn-blossom lintel2 are worth your looking at,-much more the field above, of sculpture as delicate and more calm, which tells St. Honoré's own story, little talked of now in his Parisian faubourg.

8. I will not keep you just now to tell St. Honoré's story-(only too glad to leave you a little curious about it, if it were possible)*-for certainly you will be impatient to go into the church; and cannot enter it to better advantage than by this door. For all cathedrals of any mark have nearly the same effect when you enter at the west door; but I know no other which shows so much of its nobleness from the south interior transept; the opposite rose being of exquisite fineness in tracery, and lovely in lustre; and the shafts of the transept aisles forming wonderful groups with those of the choir and nave; also, the apse shows its height better, as it opens to you when you advance from the transept into the mid-nave, than when it is seen at once from the west end of the nave; where it is just possible for an irreverent person rather to think the nave narrow, than the apse high. Therefore, if you let me guide you, go in at this south transept door, (and put a sou into every beggar's box who asks it there, it is none of your business whether they should be there or not, nor whether they deserve to have the sou, be sure only that you yourself deserve to have it to give; and give it prettily, and not as if it burnt your fingers). Then, being once inside, take what first sensation and general glimpse of it pleases you promising the custode to come back to see it

*See, however, § 36, 112-114 of The Two Paths [Vol. XVI. pp. 281, 355-357].

[For the allusion here, see Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 47 and n. (Vol. XXXIV.).] "Less charming," says M. Proust in a note to his French translation, than that of Bourges," which is "the cathedral of the hawthorn"-referring to Stones of Venice, vol. i. ch. 2, § 13 (Vol. IX. p. 70).]

properly; (only then mind you keep the promise,) and in this first quarter of an hour, seeing only what fancy bids you-but at least, as I said, the apse from mid-nave, and all the traverses of the building, from its centre. Then you will know, when you go outside again, what the architect was working for, and what his buttresses and traceries mean. For the outside of a French cathedral, except for its sculpture, is always to be thought of as the wrong side of the stuff, in which you find how the threads go that produce the inside or right-side pattern. And if you have no wonder in you for that choir and its encompassing circlet of light, when you look up into it from the cross-centre, you need not travel farther in search of cathedrals, for the waiting-room of any station is a better place for you;-but, if it amaze you and delight you at first, then, the more you know of it, the more it will amaze. For it is not possible for imagination and mathematics together, to do anything nobler or stronger than that procession of window, with material of glass and stone -nor anything which shall look loftier, with so temperate and prudent measure of actual loftiness.

9. From the pavement to the keystone of its vault is but 132 French feet-about 150 English. Think onlyyou who have been in Switzerland, the Staubbach falls nine hundred! Nay, Dover cliff under the castle, just at the end of the Marine Parade, is twice as high; and the little cockneys parading to military polka on the asphalt below, think themselves about as tall as it, I suppose, -nay, what with their little lodgings and stodgings and podgings about it, they have managed to make it look no bigger than a moderate-sized limekiln. Yet it is twice the height of Amiens' apse !—and it takes good building, with only such bits of chalk as one can quarry beside Somme, to make your work stand half that height, for six hundred years.

1

[On the height, apparent and real, of cathedrals and mountains, compare Seven Lamps, ch. iii. § 4 (Vol. VIII. p. 104).]