gods incapable. It was as if one of
those fair, triumphant beings had cast in his lot with the creatures of
an age later than his own, people of larger spiritual capacity and
assuredly of a larger capacity for melancholy. With this fancy in my
mind, by the help of certain notes, which lay in the priest's curious
library, upon the history of the works at the cathedral during the
period of its finishing, and in repeated examination of the old
tapestried designs, the story shaped itself at last.

Towards the middle of the thirteenth century the cathedral of Saint
Etienne was complete in its main outlines: what remained was the
building of the great tower, and all that various labour of final
decoration which it would take more than one generation to accomplish.
Certain circumstances, however, not wholly explained, led to a somewhat
rapid finishing, as it were out of hand, yet with a marvellous fulness
at once and grace. Of the result much has perished, or been transferred
elsewhere; a portion is still visible in sumptuous relics of stained
windows, and, above all, in the reliefs which adorn the western
portals, very delicately carved in a fine, firm stone from Tonnerre, of
which time has only browned the surface, and which, for early mastery
in art, may be compared with the contemporary work of Italy. They come
nearer than the art of that age was used to do to the expression of
life; with a feeling for reality, in no ignoble form, caught, it might
seem, from the ardent and full-veined existence then current in these
actual streets and houses. Just then Auxerre had its turn in that
political movement which broke out sympathetically, first in one, then
in another of the towns of France, turning their narrow, feudal
institutions into a free, communistic life--a movement of which those
great centres of popular devotion, the French cathedrals, are in many
instances the monument. Closely connected always with the assertion of
individual freedom, alike in mind and manners, at Auxerre this
political stir was associated also, as cause or effect, with the figure
and character of a particular personage, long remembered. He was the
very genius, it would appear, of that new, free, generous manner in
art, active and potent as a living creature.

As the most skilful of the band of carvers worked there one day, with a
labour he could never quite make equal to the vision within him, a
finely-sculptured Greek coffin of stone, which had be