such a return of a
golden or poetically-gilded age (a denizen of old Greece itself
actually finding his way back again among men) as it happened in an
ancient town of medieval France.

[48] Of the French town, properly so called, in which the products of
successive ages, not without lively touches of the present, are blended
together harmoniously, with a beauty specific--a beauty cisalpine and
northern, yet at the same time quite distinct from the massive German
picturesque of Ulm, or Freiburg, or Augsburg, and of which Turner has
found the ideal in certain of his studies of the rivers of France, a
perfectly happy conjunction of river and town being of the essence of
its physiognomy--the town of Auxerre is perhaps the most complete
realisation to be found by the actual wanderer. Certainly, for
picturesque expression it is the most memorable of a distinguished
group of three in these parts,--Auxerre, Sens, Troyes,--each gathered,
as if with deliberate aim at such effect, about the central mass of a
huge grey cathedral.

Around Troyes the natural picturesque is to be sought only in the rich,
almost coarse, summer colouring of the Champagne country, of which the
very tiles, the plaster and brick-work of its tiny villages and great,
straggling, village-like farms have caught the warmth. The cathedral,
visible far and wide over the fields seemingly of loose wild-flowers,
itself a rich mixture of all the varieties of the Pointed style down to
the latest Flamboyant, may be noticed among the greater French churches
for breadth of proportions internally, and is famous [49] for its
almost unrivalled treasure of stained glass, chiefly of a florid,
elaborate, later type, with much highly conscious artistic contrivance
in design as well as in colour. In one of the richest of its windows,
for instance, certain lines of pearly white run hither and thither,
with delightful distant effect, upon ruby and dark blue. Approaching
nearer you find it to be a Travellers' window, and those odd lines of
white the long walking-staves in the hands of Abraham, Raphael, the
Magi, and the other saintly patrons of journeys. The appropriate
provincial character of the bourgeoisie of Champagne is still to be
seen, it would appear, among the citizens of Troyes. Its streets, for
the most part in timber and pargeting, present more than one unaltered
specimen of the ancient hotel or town-house, with forecourt and garden
in the rear; and its more devo