ing you what you have in your
books,--but I have them all here, here in my heart, and many a time I
too come to refresh my old memory, and to pray. Those pictures tell
great lessons to those that have eyes to see them. Well, well-a-day, I
must pick up my melons and begone, for I have taken up your time and
said too much. But you will excuse it in an old woman who is good for
little else than talking now."

They parted in true French fashion, with "expressions of mutual esteem,"
and the traveller turned to the portal which was still fulfilling its
ancient mission of teaching and of making beautiful the House of God.
Applied to a severe facade typical of the plainness of Provencal outer
walls, this is one of the noblest works of Mediaevalism, the richest and
most beautiful portal of the South of France; and no others in the Midi,
except those of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard and Moissac, are worthy of
comparison with it. In boldness and intellectuality of conception it
excels many of the northern works and equals the finest of them. For the
builder of the northern portal seems to have held closely to one
architectural form, the beautiful convention of the Gothic style; and
within that door he placed, in a more or less usual way, the subjects
which the Church had sanctioned. In nearly every case the treatment of
the subject is subordinated to the general architectural plan and
symmetry. At Saint-Trophime there was the limit of space, the axiom that
a door must be a door, and doubtless many allowable subjects. But within
these necessary bounds the unknown sculptor recognised few
conventionalities. The usual place for the portrayal of the Last
Judgment, the tympanum, was too small for his conception of the scene;
the pier that divides his door-way was not built to support the statue
of the church's patron saint; he had a multitude of fancies, and instead
of curbing them in some beautiful conventionality of form, as one feels
great northern builders often did, this artist made a frame within which
his ideas found free play, and, forcing conventionality to its will, his
genius justified itself. For not only is the portal as a whole, full of
dignity and true symmetry, but its details are thoughtfully worked out.
They show, with the old scholastic form of his Faith, the grasp of the
unknown master's mind, the intellectuality of his symbolism, and few
portals grow in fascination as this one, few have so interesting an
originality.

[Ill