est opened directly on the busiest, every-day
bustle. It is not a mere architectural relic, as its building was never
a mere architectural feat. It is the symbol of a past stage of life, a
majestic part of the picture we conjure before our mind's eye, when we
consider Mediaevalism.

[Illustration: A NAVE OF THE LATER STYLE.--RODEZ.]

Such a picture of a city of another country and of the late Middle Ages
exists in the drama of Richard Wagner's Meistersinger; and his Nuremberg
of the XVI century, with changes of local colour, is the type of all
mediaeval towns. General travel was unknown. The activity of the great
roads was the march of armies, the roving of marauders, the journeys of
venturesome merchants or well-armed knights. Not only roads, but even
streets were unsafe at night; and after the sun had set he who had gone
about freely and carelessly during the day, remained at home or ventured
out with much caution. When armies camped about her walls, the city was
doubtless much occupied with outside happenings. But when the camp broke
up and war was far away, her shoemaker made his shoes, her goldsmith,
fine chains and trinkets, her merchants traded in the market-place.
Their interests were in street brawls, romancings, new "privileges," the
work or the feast of the day--in a word town-topics. Yet being as other
men, the burghers also were awakened by the energy of the age, and
instead of wasting it in adventures and wars, their interest took the
form of an intense local pride, narrow, but with elements of grandeur,
seldom selfish, but civic.

This absence of the personal element is nowhere better illustrated than
in Cathedral building. Of all the really great men who planned the
Cathedrals of France, almost nothing is known; and by searching, little
can be found out. Who can give a dead date, much less a living fact,
concerning the life of that Gervais who conceived the great Gothic
height of Narbonne? Who can tell even the name of him who planned the
sombre, battlemented walls of Agde, or of that great man who first saw
in poetic vision the delicate choir of Saint-Nazaire in Carcassonne?
Artists have a well-preserved personality,--cathedral-builders, none.
Robert of Luzarches who conceived the "Parthenon of all Gothic
architecture," and the man who planned stately Sens and the richness of
Canterbury, are as unknown to us as the quarries from which the stones
of their Cathedrals were cut. It is not the Cathedral bu