it is worthy of a
place in the memory among odd delusions. As an honest delusion, it is at
least more respectable than making Alfred found things at Oxford and
Ripon.

[Illustration: Notre-Dame, Saint-Lo, S.E.]

In position, Saint-Lo, town and church, outdoes Coutances. It is, we
believe, a favourite resort of artists, and it deserves to be so. At
Coutances we are on a hill. If we draw near to it by railway, we see the
three towers of the cathedral church soaring far above us, and even the
two towers of Saint Peter are by no means on our own level. The town
stands on a height, at the end of a range of high ground; yet somehow
there is not the same feeling of a hill town about Coutances which there
is in many other places--one thing perhaps is that there is no river.
The hill of Coutances is not a hill simply rising from a plain; there
are valleys on two sides, and we ask for a stream at the bottom of them
as naturally as we do at Edinburgh. At Saint-Lo, the Vire, with the
rocky hill rising high above it, is the chief feature of the landscape.
And as we pass by on the railway and look up, the two graceful spires of
the church of Our Lady seem quite worthy of their position. We feel at
once that the characteristic feature of Normandy and England, the
central tower, is missing. But, accepting a French effect instead of a
Norman one, the impression made by Saint-Lo and its church is a very
striking one. We must go on to Coutances and come back to Saint-Lo, and
then walk along the banks of the Vire if we wish to take in the fact,
that even the spires of Saint-Lo, much less the church as a whole, have
no claim to belong to the same class of buildings as Coutances. In
neither case is the church built, as that of Avranches must have been,
like Durham, on the brow of the hill. There is a considerable space, at
Saint-Lo a busy market, between the west front and the steep. From any
point in this space the effect of the west front of Saint-Lo is striking
beyond its actual size. The towers are of different dates, and do not
altogether match, which has the effect of thrusting the central door
rather out of its place. But the front is a grand one all the same. One
must go down below, and see from how many points the towers, and even
the spires, are lost among the houses, before we find out how
comparatively small they are. And in the body of the church we see a
marked example of an opportunity thrown away. That the church is much
sm