among that ancient family of churches, gloomy, mysterious, low, and crushed as it were by the circular arch; quite hieroglyphic, sacerdotal, symbolical; exhibiting in their decorations more lozenges and zigzags than flowers, more flowers than animals, more animals than human figures: the work not so much of the architect as of the bishop; the first transformation of the art, impressed all over with theocratic and military discipline, commencing in the Lower Empire and terminating with William the Conqueror. Neither can our cathedral be placed in that other family of churches, light, lofty, rich in painted glass and sculptures; sharp in form, bold in attitude; free, capricious, unruly, as works of art; the second transformation of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic, unchangeable and sacerdotal, but artistical, progressive, and popular, beginning with the return from the Crusades, and ending with Louis XI. Notre Dame is not of pure Roman extraction, like the former; neither is it of pure Arab extraction, like the latter.

"It is a transition edifice. The Saxon architect had set up the first pillars of the nave, when the pointed style, brought back from the Crusades, seated itself, like a conqueror, upon those broad Roman capitals designed to support circular arches only. The pointed style, thenceforward mistress, constructed the rest of the church; but unpractised and timid at its outset, it displays a breadth, a flatness, and dares not yet shoot up into steeples and pinnacles.

You would say that it is affected by the vicinity of the heavy Roman pillars.

"For the rest, those edifices of the transition from the Roman to the Gothic style are not less valuable as studies than the pure types of either; they express a shade of the art which would be lost but for them, the engrafting of the pointed upon the circular style.

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Notre Dame at Paris is a particularly curious specimen of this variety. Every face, every stone, of the venerable structure is a page, not only of the history of the country, but also of the history of art and science. Thus, to glance merely at the principal details, while the little Porte Rouge attains almost to the limits of the Gothic delicacy of the fifteenth century, the pillars of the nave, by their bulk and heaviness, carry you back to the date of the Carlovingian abbey of St. Germain des Prés. You would imagine that there were six centuries between the door-way and those pillars. There are none, down to the alchymists themselves, but find in the symbols of the grand porch, a satisfactory compendium of their science, of which the church of St. Jacques de la Boucherie was so complete an hieroglyphic. Thus the Roman abbey, and the philosophical church, Gothic art and Saxon art, the heavy round pillar, which reminds you of Gregory VII., papal unity and schism, St. Germain des Prés, and St. Jacques de la Boucherie, are all blended, combined, amalgamated, in Notre Dame. This central mother church is a

D

sort of chimæra among the ancient churches of Paris ; it has the head of one, the limbs of another, the trunk of a third, and something of them all.

"Christian European architecture, that younger sister of the grand style of the east, appears to us like an immense formation divided into three totally distinct zones, laid one upon another; the Roman zone, the Gothic zone, and the zone of the revival, which we would fain call the Græco-Roman. The Roman stratum, which is the most ancient and the lowest, is occupied by the circular arch, which again appears, supported by the Greek column, in the modern and uppermost stratum of the revival. The pointed style is between both. The edifices belonging exclusively to one of these three strata are absolutely complete, one and distinct. Such are the abbey of Jumièges, the cathedral of Rheims, the Holy Cross at Orleans. But the three zones blend and amalgamate at their borders, like the colours in the solar spectrum. Hence the complex structures, the transition edifices. The one is Roman at the foot, Gothic in the middle, Græco-Roman at the top. The reason is, that it was six centuries in building. This variety is rare; the castle of Etampes is a specimen of it. But the edifices composed of two formations

4 This is the same that is likewise called, according to countries, climates, and species, Lombard, Saxon, and Byzantine. These four are parallel and kindred varieties, each having its peculiar character, but all derived from the same principle,-the circular arch.

are frequent. Such is Notre Dame at Paris, a building in the pointed style, the first pillars of which belong to the Roman zone, like the porch of St. Denis, and the nave of St.Germain des Prés.

"For the rest, all these shades, all these differences, affect only the surface of edifices; it is but art which has changed its skin. The constitution itself of the Christian Church is not affected by them. There is always the same internal arrangement, the same logical disposition of parts. Be the sculptured and embroidered outside of a cathedral what it may, we invariably find underneath, at least, the germ and rudiment of the Roman basilica. It uniformly expands itself upon the ground according to the same law. There are, without deviation, two naves, intersecting each other in the form of a Cross, and the upper extremity of which, rounded into an apsis, forms the chancel; and two aisles for processions, and for chapels, a sort of lateral walkingplaces, into which the principal nave disgorges itself by the intercolumniations. These points being settled, the number of the chapels, porches, towers, pinnacles, is varied to infinity, according to the caprice of the age, the nation, and the art. Accommodation for the exercises of religion once provided and secured, architecture does just what it pleases. As for statues, painted windows, mullions, arabesques, open-works, capitals, basso-relievos, it combines all these devices agreeably to the system which best suits itself. Hence the prodigious external variety

in those edifices within which reside such order and unity. The trunk of the tree is unchangeable, the foliage capricious."

There is little of natural beauty in most of the northern departments of France, to keep us from passing at once from one cathedral to another. The reader must now, therefore, be transported to Chartres, with Avignon, however, closing the vista of his distant prospect. The north spire of Chartres' cathedral is very wonderful indeed, although not attaining the elegance or lightness of Antwerp. It is 412 feet high, and most minutely and delicately ornamented. The other steeple, of a pyramidal shape, is very inferior, and, indeed, the whole west front is heavy without being grand. The building has not yet recovered from the fire of 1836; and, besides that, is much disfigured as to its exterior, by edifices of the shabbiest and dirtiest description clinging to it, what Coleridge called "plaisters on the great toes of cathedrals." The inside, also, is not well kept, and the men who fitted up the choirs of Gothic cathedrals with marble cut in square wainscot patterns, must have had very little sympathy with old ecclesiastical art. It has been excellently said, that whatever injuries time and revolutions "from Luther to Mirabeau," or "the architectural paganism contemporaneous with Luther," may have inflicted upon our old cathedrals, they have all been surpassed in barbarity and presumption, by the more recent restorers, who "impudently clapped upon the wounds of Gothic