ished more luxuriantly
than did Holy Inquisition. Her churches have therefore been preserved in
their original form in greater numbers than those of the two other
provinces. They are of all types of Romanesque, all stages of its
growth, from the small and simple Cathedrals which were built when
ecclesiastical exchequers were not overflowing, to the greater ones
which illustrate very advanced and dignified phases of architectural
development; and as a whole they exhibit the normal proportion of
failure and success in an effort toward an ideal.

[Sidenote: Languedoc.]

Leon Renier, the learned lecturer of the College de France, says: "It is
remarkable that the changes, the elaborations, the modifications of the
architecture given by Rome to all countries under her domination were
conceived in the provinces long before they were reproduced in Italy.
Rome gave no longer; she received ... a transfusion of a new blood, more
vital and more rich." In Languedoc, the greater number of monuments of
this ancient architecture have been destroyed; and those of their
outgrowth, the later Romanesque, were so repeatedly mutilated that the
Cathedrals of this province present even a greater confusion of
originalities, restorations, and additions than those of Provence. To a
multitude of dates must be added corresponding differences in style.
Each school of architecture naturally considered that it had somewhat of
a monopoly of good taste and beauty, or at least that it was an
improvement on the manner which preceded it; and it would have been too
much to expect, in ages when anachronisms were unrecognised, that
churches should have been restored in their consonant, original style.
Architects of the Gothic period were unable to resist the temptation of
continuing a Romanesque nave with a choir of their own school, and
builders of the XVIII century went still further and added a showy Louis
XV facade to a modest Romanesque Cathedral. Some churches, built in
times of religious storm and stress, show the preoccupation of their
patrons or the lack of talent of their constructors; others belong to
Bishoprics that were much more lately constituted than the Sees of
Provence, and in these cases the new prelate chose a church already
begun or completed, and compromised with the demands of episcopal pomp
by an addition, usually of different style. The numerous changes,
political and religious, of the Mediaevalism of Languedoc, had such
considera