r the support of the glass, in the windows from which even [117] this
decoration is gone, still remain, to the delight of those who are
knowing in the matter.

Very ancient light, this seems, at any rate, as if it had been lying
imprisoned thus for long centuries; were in fact the light over which
the great vault originally closed, now become almost substance of
thought, one might fancy,--a mental object or medium. We are reminded
that after all we must of necessity look on the great churches of the
Middle Age with other eyes than those who built or first worshipped in
them; that there is something verily worth having, and a just
equivalent for something else lost, in the mere effect of time, and
that the salt of all aesthetic study is in the question,--What,
precisely what, is this to me? You and I, perhaps, should not care
much for the mural colouring of a medieval church, could we see it as
it was; might think it crude, and in the way. What little remains of it
at Amiens has parted, indeed, in the course of ages, with its
shrillness and its coarse grain. And in this matter certainly, in view
of Gothic polychrome, our difference from the people of the thirteenth
century is radical. We have, as it was very unlikely they should have,
a curiosity, a very pleasurable curiosity, in the mere working of the
stone they built with, and in the minute facts of their construction,
which their colouring, and the layer of plaster it involved, disguised
or hid. We may think that in architecture stone is the most beautiful
[118] of all things. Modern hands have replaced the colour on some of
the tombs here--the effigies, the tabernacles above--skilfully as may
be, and have but deprived them of their dignity. Medieval colouring,
in fact, must have improved steadily, as it decayed, almost till there
came to be no question of colour at all. In architecture, close as it
is to men's lives and their history, the visible result of time is a
large factor in the realised aesthetic value, and what a true architect
will in due measure always trust to. A false restoration only
frustrates the proper ripening of his work.

If we may credit our modern eyes, then, those old, very secular
builders aimed at, they achieved, an immense cheerfulness in their
great church, with a purpose which still pursued them into their
minuter decoration. The conventional vegetation of the Romanesque, its
blendings of human or animal with vegetable form, in