ed and coloured enclosures of the choir, with
the histories of John the Baptist, whose face-bones are here preserved,
and of Saint Firmin--popular saint, who protects the houses of Amiens
from fire. Even the screens of forged iron around the sanctuary, work
of the seventeenth century, appear actually to soar, in their way, in
concert with the airy Gothic structure; to let the daylight pass as it
will; to have come, they too, from smiths, odd as it may seem at just
that time, with some touch of inspiration in them. In the beginning of
the fifteenth century they had reared against a certain bald space of
wall, between the great portal and the western "rose," an organ, a
lofty, many-chambered, veritable house of church-music, rich in azure
and gold, finished above at a later day, not incongruously, in the
quaint, pretty manner of Henri-Deux. And those who are interested in
the curiosities of ritual, of the old provincial Gallican "uses," will
be surprised to find one where they might least have expected it. The
reserved Eucharist still hangs suspended in a pyx, formed like a dove,
in the midst of that lamentable "glory" of the eighteenth century in
the central bay of the sanctuary, all the poor, gaudy, gilt rays
converging towards it. There are days in the year in which the great
church is still literally filled with reverent worshippers, and if you
come late to service you push the [123] doors in vain against the
closely serried shoulders of the good people of Amiens, one and all in
black for church-holiday attire. Then, one and all, they intone the
Tantum ergo (did it ever sound so in the Middle Ages?) as the
Eucharist, after a long procession, rises once more into its
resting-place.

If the Greeks, as at least one of them says, really believed there
could be no true beauty without bigness, that thought certainly is most
specious in regard to architecture; and the thirteenth-century church
of Amiens is one of the three or four largest buildings in the world,
out of all proportion to any Greek building, both in that and in the
multitude of its external sculpture. The chapels of the nave are
embellished without by a double range of single figures, or groups,
commemorative of the persons, the mysteries, to which they are
respectively dedicated--the gigantic form of Christopher, the Mystery
of the Annunciation.

The builders of the church seem to have projected no very noticeable
towers; though it is conventional to